CentrePasquArt Biel presents Uriel Orlow. Time is a Place, an exhibition on view through 26 August 2012.
Following presentations of his work in Chewing the Scenery, one of the two Swiss pavilions at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and in numerous international group exhibitions, Uriel Orlow is staging his first comprehensive institutional one-person exhibition at Kunsthaus CentrePasquArt. Orlow’s work examines overlooked sites of history and unspectacular events that refer to larger historical connections. The artist works across media in video, photography, drawing, and sound and in his modular installations brings together different image regimes and narrative modes.
Uriel Orlow, Yellow Limbo, 2010. Videostill, © Uriel Orlow.
Uriel Orlow combines material from his own research with images that he himself has filmed or photographed and which oscillate between imagination and documentation, fact and fiction. The artist is interested in the material quality of traces, the visual aspect of history and possible future scenarios that emerge at the meeting point of present and past.
Uriel Orlow’s approach in uncovering and interpreting precarious situations in which individuals and groups of people find themselves combines intellectual rigour with visual poetry and communicates a wealth of information with a light touch. The installations presented in the exhibition focus on a ghost town in northern Armenia that connects a massacre of the Armenian people in 1915 with the Soviet Union’s last important housing project in 1988; 14 freight ships that were stranded for 8 years in the Suez Canal; a former synagogue in the Polish town of Poznan that the Nazis turned into a swimming pool in 1942; a video portrait of the British National Archive; and the history of a statue built in honour of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was responsible for the construction of the Suez Canal. –Felicity Lunn
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