Esther Shalev-Gerz — Space Between Time — Wasserman Projects — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 29 → July 9, 2016

Highlights include: Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz, 1945-2005 (2005), a large-scale video installation produced from Shalev-Gerz’s interviews with sixty survivors of the Holocaust. Shalev-Gerz has edited the interviews to include only the quiet moments of recollection her subjects undergo before answering the questions of what they did before, during, and after the war. The resulting footage underscores the intangible moments of communication that occur through physical response and sheer silence.

“Describing Labor” (2012), a multimedia installation that expands upon Shalev-Gerz’s research into early 20th century labor conditions and practices. Its series of photographs illustrate the nature of the act of production through a series of vintage images of factory workers and other laborers. Rather than illustrate a history of labor practices, these images serve as a meditation on the nature of the act of production, and of mankind as producers. The project examines the seismic shift in the way society has changed its perception of labor in the last 100 years, from patriotic, heroic, even eroticized, to something today invisible, consigned to unknown and undervalued foreigners.

Making its debut in Space Between Time will be “In Form” and “Blue and Golden Pneuma” (2016). “In Form” investigates the notion of a cut so that we question the difference between perception versus conception. Pneuma comes from the ancient Greek word for breath as a vital spirit, soul, or creative force. Like breath, the two channel video flows through cycles of life and death as a continuation of Shalev- Gerz’s quest to master the temporal surfaces of nature. Through the depiction of towering trees being felled to shrinking bodies of water, the works offer continuous contemplation of the changing landscape around us.