Iris Nesher | Out of Time | Portrait Time I

Curator: Aya Lurie

Sep. 21, 2019 - Feb. 1, 2020

At the center of Iris Nesher’s exhibition is a projection on a loop of snapshots of her son, Ari Nesher, taken at various museums and other art-related destinations around the world. The images begin with a photograph of Ari as a child of six, during a family visit to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. He is stretched out, asleep or possibly dozing, on the stuffed cloth cushions at the center of the exhibition hall, stoically accepting the need to wait for his family to finish their visit to the exhibition. In the wake of that first photograph, an entire series emerged over the years – gradually, and amidst consultations between mother and son over direction and positioning – during other family visits to museums or churches containing art treasures. The final photograph in the series was taken shortly before Ari’s tragic death, at the age of seventeen, in a road accident. With chilling prescience, he is shown sleeping with his hand hanging over the edge, beneath the image of a crucified Jesus, both illuminated by direct and dramatic artificial lighting.

In its traditional incarnation, a museum presents, preserves, and researches the material human culture held in its collections. Its immaculate architectural setting (be it custom built, or adapted for the purpose) is itself a cultural artifact, which magnifies its function as a contemporaneous time capsule. Indeed, the traditional museum functions to a large extent as a mausoleum and archive – a place of conservation and commemoration that allows us to go back in time and to linger there as an transitional space that is temporarily suspended from the present. Nesher, like many photographers before her, finds the museum space to be a fertile field in which to explore the visual and conceptual dialogue forged between the architecture, the exhibits, and the visitors.

Nesher’s snapshot projection concludes with two photographs of the artist herself, against the backdrop of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome: in one, her eyes are closed, and in the other they are wide open. Behind her a black-clad figure is passing by on a motorcycle, like a phantom bearer of bad tidings. On the museum’s steps are an assortment of lion statues, alluding to the meaning of her son’s name, and at the center of the image is a large inscription of the title of the exhibition at the time: Time is Out of Joint – a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act I, Scene 5), which describes a painful moment of crisis, when Hamlet learns the truth about his father’s murder. The prince, who is duty-bound to take revenge and heal his kingdom, is struck by a debilitating paralysis, and manages only to fulfill his tragic destiny. He clearly recognizes the harsh reality and, at the same time, refuses to acknowledge it and is impeded by it.

The tension between the frozen stills and the motion of the woman’s eyes, resulting from the screening, as they fleetingly open and close, captures the nature of photography as a medium capable of freezing time and preserving what is transitory.

Original music by Isaac Sehayek
Edited by Ilan Pustopetski

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