The series of works by Ori Levin presents private and public moments of death and disaster. First the viewer sees strewn bodies, victims of a recent catastrophe. The images are familiar to us all: fields of death, cases of homicide, accidents, all seen in newspaper photographs, police reenactments and Hollywood movies. The meaning is instantly clear. At first the images seem utterly static, perhaps just a column of smoke or a bird on the horizon, or a slow burning flame. Suddenly all is flooded with light and viewers see the emergence of the image’s construction and the staging of the scene. It shifts from the moment of death backward in time, a possibility that can only exist in cinema and moving pictures, never in reality – the ability to move back to the moment of death and its ending. This reveals a fictitious construction, and makes suspect every similar image already witnessed. However, despite their universality the images are deeply personal: the victim is always the artist’s mother, and beneath the public image the depicted moment seems like an endless goodbye. It is a moment bent back on itself, a compulsive repetition that cannot be escaped. And it appears again the moment it is concluded, always reappearing but without any way to know when or how.
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