Page 23 - Lior Gal

On Lior Gal’s Ritualis,c Coiled Photography
Ory Dessau

Lior Gal’s work rearranges our prior knowledge about the rela,onship between land art and ac,on-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 aMached to an
addi,onal one of another loca,on to construct a layered percep,on. Gal pastes the photographic landscapes to
create a hybridized appearance of welded moments, places, perspec,ves and situa,ons, disobedient to the reality
principle of photographic depic,on. The collage-like appearance conveys a duality which carries the photographic
mechanism to the realm of introspec,ve expression.

Gal challenges the s,llness of the photographic mechanism and its quali,es as a technique of displacing objects and sights,
in order to expand his prac,ce towards sculptural proposi,ons in space. By processing photographic prints as suspended,
detached elements, Gal ignores the dis,nc,on between real and imaginary, in the context of which photographic
appearances are turned into material appari,ons, becoming simultaneously ghostly and voluminous. Furthermore, Gal’s
photographic cri,que involves coiling a thread around his welded collages. The thread gradually screens the image,
incorpora,ng a visual impairment that goes against the immediacy of the mechanized photographic recording.
It undermines the totality of photographic imagery whilst reverbera,ng the original traversal with its ranging visibility and
slowed temporality.

Coiling the thread allows Gal to dislocate the travel experience into the domes,c 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
connec,on to nature. Coiling the threads not only recalls exis,ng religious rituals, it also amounts to a ritual of its own, a
form of evoca,on, which exploits the evoca,ve power already imbued in Gal’s ini,al 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 communica,on. In this sense, his work is part of an ar,s,c heritage recognized with ar,sts from different
genera,ons like James Coleman and Shannon Ebner, who embrace the ‘obsolete’ as a way to rela,vize and weaken the
global dominance of digital representa,on. By gran,ng his visual output a sense of introspec,ve expression Gal’s u,liza,on
of analog photography contests the digital image in its own field, undermining the already undermined dis,nc,on between
real and fake associable with the later.