Roei Greenberg
Roei Greenberg
English Encounters
Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
The rural walk is a well-known English cultural practice. Though it may be civil, the act of walking itself is rooted in ideology from my cultural background; to walk the land is to know the land, and therefore suggests belonging entitlement and ownership. I begin to survey the English countryside, becoming familiar with the island’s geography, an act of mapping that refers to imperial and colonial histories.
Pertaining to Romanticism, I appropriate the visual rules of the picturesque, traditionally used to create an illusion of social and natural harmony. The dramatic light and weather conditions combined with forensic attention to details and on-site interventions intend to provoke the ambiguous feelings of seduction and alienation. Poetic and alluring yet tinged with irony, the images seek to disrupt traditional modes of representation in a place where land ownership and social hierarchy have shaped the form and perception of the landscape for centuries.
Bio
London based - Israeli artist (b.1985)
I grew up on a Kibbutz, located on the northern Israeli border with Lebanon. In 2009 I moved to Tel Aviv, where I completed a BA Photography in 2013. After years of investigating the Israeli landscape, its geography, historical narratives, and my biography, I left Israel in 2018. In the search for a new subject matter, I found myself once again drawn to questions of land and power, belonging, and legitimacy.
My photographic practice is concerned with landscape as a complex intersection between culture, geography, and autobiography. The effects of human activity on land, political borders, and ecology are amongst the issues investigated in my work. The use of large-format camera and film creates a multi-layered photographic perspective, pictorial and alluring yet seeking to disrupt traditional modes of landscape representation.