When Awareness Rose | Pesi Girsch

Pesi Girsch

• Date1991
• TechniqueSilver Print
• Size80x120

This work of art is one of several works of art by Pesi Girsch exhibited in the Museum. “The Photographed Halo” was first exhibited in May 1992 in the Jerusalem Museum. In her personal work of art Girsch records and documents complex texts of life and death, conceives rituals expressing loneliness and fear, alongside spiritual visions of seemingly impossible situations. Her inspiration is derived from the origins of man such as earth, water and heavens. She frequently uses wide-lens photography when the chosen landscape serves as a ritual stage: a ploughed field, a rock, a tree and cemeteries. The severed limbs and their detachment from the body in the “Photographed Halo” work seemingly connect with the pile of bodies with limbs poking through in the concentration camps. Furthermore these limbs recall the classic severed limb sculptures which Girsch is well acquainted with from her childhood thanks to her sculpture teacher, Rudi Lehmann. The models embedded in her works are friends and relations, which intensifies the personal subject which she talks about and discusses. She presents them meticulously, in taut situations sometimes even bordering on acrobatics.