Kunsthalle seitenlichtsaal presents
Nira Pereg
Kept Alive
9 March–9 April 2012
Opening:
Thursday, 8 March 2012, 7pm
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4
D-40213 Düsseldorf
Tue–Sun, public holidays 11–18h
T +49 211 89 96 243
F +49 211 89 29 168
mail [at] kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de
It is our culture and religious heritage as well as the related social rules and behavioural patterns that the Israeli artist Nira Pereg (born 1969) focuses on in her video installations and photographs. Her documentary approach questions power structures and rituals that determine our daily life. The respective work orbits social realities in the form of an open narration. Nira Pereg follows a conceptual strategy in the process that is characterized by an overlapping of image and sound as well as a reduced and simultaneously exceedingly aesthetic pictorial language.
In her video Kept Alive (2009–10) and in the accompanying series of photographs, Nira Pereg presents “Har HaMenuchot” (Mountain of Rest), Jerusalem’s largest cemetery as a site of remembrance and workplace as well as an urban concept: the cemetery becomes the site of an everyday performance – the construction and maintenance of graves. The strong and omnipresent influence of the graves on Israel’s social system is directly visualised by means of the place where this world and the next meet.
This work, which was awarded the 2009 Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize, is being shown for the first time in Germany.
The exhibition, which is curated by Kathrin Barutzki and Gregor Jansen, is accompanied by a booklet with texts by Kathrin Barutzki and Gregor Jansen as well as a conversation between Nira Pereg and Boris Groys.
