Page 3 - Lior Gal

On Lior Gal’s Ritualistic Coiled Photography

Lior Gal’s work rearranges our prior knowledge about the relationship between land art and action-in-and-on the landscape. Predominantly, his work
stems from traversals - long walks in arid places, during which imprints in the landscape are being photographed and printed in black & white.
The printed photographic record is attached to an additional one of another location to construct a layered perception. Gal pastes the photographic
landscapes to create a hybridized appearance of welded moments, places, perspectives and situations, disobedient to the reality principle of
photographic depiction. The collage-like appearance conveys a duality which carries the photographic mechanism to the realm of introspective
expression.
Gal challenges the stillness of the photographic mechanism and its qualities as a technique of displacing objects and sights, in order to expand his practice
towards sculptural propositions in space. By processing photographic prints as suspended, detached elements, Gal ignores the distinction between real
and imaginary, in the context of which photographic appearances are turned into material apparitions, becoming simultaneously ghostly and voluminous.
Furthermore, Gal’s photographic critique involves coiling a thread around his welded collages. The thread gradually screens the image, incorporating a
visual impairment that goes against the immediacy of the mechanized photographic recording.
It undermines the totality of photographic imagery whilst reverberating the original traversal with its ranging visibility and slowed temporality.
Coiling the thread allows Gal to dislocate the travel experience into the domestic space without losing its magnitude. It brings to mind the Hindu ritual of
the Puja, in which a thread is being wrapped around a trunk of a tree to signify the connection to nature. Coiling the threads not only recalls existing
religious rituals, it also amounts to a ritual of its own, a form of evocation, which exploits the evocative power already imbued in Gal’s initial traversals.

The use of analog photography in Gal’s work can be regarded as a response to the flux of digital imagery governing our day-to-day life and communication.
In this sense, his work is part of an artistic heritage recognized with artists from different generations like James Coleman and Shannon Ebner, who
embrace the ‘obsolete’ as a way to relativize and weaken the global dominance of digital representation. By granting his visual output a sense of
introspective expression Gal’s utilization of analog photography contests the digital image in its own field, undermining the already undermined
distinction between real and fake associable with the later.

Ory Dessau