Oded Balilty "Unidentified object "

Opening event: Thursday, 3.6 at 20:00 (closing: 10.7)
Zimak Gallery Contemporary Art - 68 H. Bayer Street, Tel Aviv
Curator: Yaron Harmati / Text: Reut Barnea

In his new solo exhibition " Unidentified Object ", photographer Oded Balilty continues his work on the connection between object and background, between culture and nature, and between the meaningful and the insignificant.

Bilty began his work on the subject in his previous series of photographs, "White Noise", which was also shown at the Zimak Gallery (in parallel with a solo exhibition of the same series at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art), in which objects isolated their natural place from their background by placing a white screen behind them. He takes artificial objects, which he has specially created, and places them in natural landscapes - so that the object becomes the subject of work and nature becomes nothing more than a background.

Balilty's move in this exhibition begins with the production of geometric objects made of iron rods and connectors printed on a 3D printer, which he placed against the backdrop of the landscape. The objects, three-dimensional geometric objects, were each placed against a different background - from the desert to the beach, casting a significant shadow while shooting. The same shadow becomes perhaps the most prominent and central sign of the fact that this is a photograph of a moment of reality, and not of work done through computer processing. Another sign that indicates the presence of the object in reality is the moment it meets the earth. The connection of the object to the ground in each image creates a tension that the viewer's eyes cannot help but dwell on.

In the landscape he uses lilty as in white canvas, into which he "lands" the objects and thus brings the artificial and the engineered into the natural, the city into the desert and the sea, himself into space. The objects you landed seem for a moment to UFOs, unidentified objects that landed in unfamiliar territory and brought with them a different appearance and a different value system. Balilty's use of the landscape as a canvas also makes the works much more than photographs - he creates drawing in space and sculpture in the landscape on the other. Incorporates within it several other artistic mediums.

Balilty's photographs, as stated, are not digitally processed in any way. At first glance they look like they have Photoshop work in them, but that's not the case. Balilty took the non-functional objects with him in a car from location to location, planned, tried, organized and arranged so that the image would come out the way he wanted it, without any digital intervention. In this way Balilty discusses the power relationship between the object and the background: Is the background in the photograph just to wrap the object? Is the object just placed there to highlight the background? The attempt to reach a balance between the two factors is made by drawing attention to the small minimalist object, against the background of the power. By actually "discounting" the object, the natural background becomes very marginal in the image. It is flat, lacks contrast, as its name implies - background. The object, unidentified and meaningless, is the one that gets to the front of the stage and gains the star status in the image, despite and despite the lack of connection and lack of functionality in it.

The same geometric objects, when collected in a series of photographs displayed side by side, take on a new meaning. They can point to a suggestion for a futuristic move, an intervention in creation, like ones that have landed simultaneously in different places across the globe and signal to us the beginning of something new, one that we all long for, especially in the present time.

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Oded Balilty (b. 1979) is one of the leading press photographers in the country. He has won a long list of awards in Israel and around the world, including the Pulitzer Prize for News Photography for 2007 for a photo he took while evacuating the Amona outpost. Since 2002 he has been a photographer for the international news agency AP and currently heads its photography department in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In addition to his journalistic work, Balilty has in recent years created personal projects that he presents in galleries and museums around the country and the world. His works are in important public and private collections.