TULSA, OKLA.- Philbrook Downtown debuted Nir Evron: Projected Claims during the Brady Arts District First Friday Art Crawl on May 1, 2015. This serves as the first solo exhibition at a museum in the United States for Nir Evron, an emerging Israeli artist, who has been attracting international attention and accolades. Working in film, video and photography, Evron explores the intersections of history, culture, politics, identity, religion, and shifting borders, primarily focused on his native country of Israel and its areas of conflict. The works in this exhibition examine these sweeping forces as captured and expressed through landscape, architecture, and city planning.
This original exhibition, curated by Lauren Ross during her time as Philbrook’s Nancy E. Meinig Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, presents a combination of recent and brand new work: two projected videos—In Virgin Land and Oriental Arch—and as well as selections from Threshold, a new series of doubly exposed black and white photographs in the Irene & Sanford Burnstein Gallery and the Lobeck Taylor Lobby of Philbrook Downtown, May 1 – October 18, 2015. After its presentation at Philbrook Downtown, the exhibition will travel to The Depot Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, November 6, 2015 – January 17, 2016.
In Virgin Land (2006) presents a series of striking images of the Israeli landscape. Featuring tones of gray resembling celluloid film, the video showcases the country’s ecological diversity, from valleys to the sea. Each shot is devoid of people or signs of development, presenting the location as a pristine paradise. The audio voice-over, delivered in Hebrew with English subtitles, outlines the observations of a foreign visitor, sharing impressions as the land is explored. Initially this voice may seem to deliver a linear narrative from a single source, but before long, it is apparent that it is disjointed. Only when the credits roll at the end of the video is it fully revealed that the spoken observations were pulled from a multitude of sources; visitors from diverse lands whose explorations took place over centuries. The video is a meditation on the significance of the region to a wide swathe of people over a long history, including its sacred status as a holy land and homeland to multiple populations.
Oriental Arch (2009) is a video diary of sorts, capturing a single day at the Seven Arches Hotel on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Through a series of slow, lingering shots, viewers are escorted through the hotel’s lobby, hallways, restaurant, and kitchen, observing the staff going through their daily routines despite the presence of relatively few guests. The video has no narrative arc—other than the passing of time, from morning to night—or dialogue. It offers the hotel as a place seemingly stuck in a temporal loop in which activities repeat on a daily basis, yet are disconnected from the present. The hotel opened in the early 1960s as a place of luxury and import, but because of the annexation of the area in which it resides, today it is state run, and languishes in relative obscurity.
Threshold (2015), a brand new work, makes its debut in this exhibition. This series of black and white images were shot by Evron on the site of Rawabi, a new Palestinian city currently under development in the West Bank. This community, planned to eventually contain a population of over 40,000, is being constructed at a fast rate, with the financial backing of banks and companies investing over $1 billion USD. Evron’s interest in documenting this site is due not only in its design and physical structure, but in its optimistic conception and marketing campaign, which portray the city as a middle class haven, despite the extreme turmoil and complex politics of the region.
