Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel. In the video, a fallen parachutist hangs tangled by his own lines, suspended between two electrical towers in a surreally desolate landscape of overgrown fields in the Jordan Valley of Israel. A group of over a hundred men and women approach the towers, working with almost mechanic efficiency to free the parachutist from the power lines overhead. Although the subject of a would-be rescue mission, it is never clear if the parachutist survived the fall – seemingly inanimate, he functions more as an object of convergence to bring the various actors on the ground together. Filmed near the Jordanian border with Israel, the video considers multiple iterations of borderlands – from the geo-political borders between nation states to the border between life and death occupied by the endangered parachutist – while also suggesting how these intermediate spaces can be static. Hirsch’s work, however, suggests that complacency can only be countered by communal effort and action. We never know the outcome of the groups’ attempt to save the parachutist, and this ambiguity troubles our desire and expectation for resolution. But in foregrounding the imperative need for collective response, Hirsch stakes out a critical space for shared experiences driven by empathy while advocating for greater common awareness and understanding.
Oded Hirsch produces video, installation, and photography that explore the phenomena of collective experience and participatory spectacle in present day Israel. Born and raised in Kibbutz Afikim, Israel, Hirsch examines how group structures function as a point of departure for deeper considerations of circumstance, choice, and communal action. Often removed from logic and reason, his videos show conflict and resolution as contemporaneous and co-essential phenomenon. While his works occasionally employ absurd tropes to disorienting effect, his narratives focus on situations that invite collective response, shared experience, and greater consciousness of the world around us. Recent solo shows include: The Mad Lift, Liverpool Biennial, UK; Nothing New, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; The Chelsea Project, EDS Galeria, Mexico City; and Sleep Tight Ramat-Gan Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel. Recent group exhibitions include: MASS MoCA, MA; Queens Museum of Art, New York; The Jewish Museum, Munich, Germany; Black and White Gallery, New York; Lesley Heller Workspace, New York; Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX; and the Soap Factory, Minneapolis.
Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (Palette) (2023) Alex Israel returns to Almine Rech in Paris this fall for his fifth solo show with the gallery, adding a new perspective and mode of interpretation to the understanding and recontextualization of Pablo Picasso on the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death...
Ground Plan by Louisa Bufardeci is a large-scale, digitally-printed, architecturally rendered, wall drawing that pictures the permitted global flow of the world’s population...
The absurd condition of human survival under environmental degradation and geonational balkanization is taken as a starting point for WA’AD by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES...