Ori Gersht

I have lived all my life as part of an ethnic conflict.

For a short time I was an assistant to a professional photographer, and I felt that my soul was not there. That is the stage when I decided to stay in London and do a graduate degree.

Consider the bloody history of Europe: there was a great aspiration for high culture, yet this very same culture was shaped by brutality and barbarism.

Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.

I look at life as a one-time opportunity, and you have to take pleasure in each moment, even if it is very problematic.

My work is not so much a direct commentary as it is an open-ended observation of the absurdities around us.

I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.