Eran Tsafrir's aesthetic forms of expressions engage with the multitude of ways fate, circumstances, and choice shape our lives as individuals, communities and societies. Creating real and virtual poetic spaces for reflection, they enhance perception and awareness of issues of personal and public concern, and serve as catalysts for change and transformation.
Process
"The work has an indexed, raw, documentary source element at its centre. It often begins with a photograph, a realistic figurative image of an untrained sitter or an image of nature, a landscape from my immediate surrounding. The image is captured on film, an analogue colour transparency, using available light without filters, not manipulated or retouched. Or it develops from a raw sound recording (e.g. crashing waves, the movement of underwater currents, a hail storm, a protest march), an archival document, a sound extract or footage (e.g. a parliamentary debate or a political statement).
Then, moving away from the original indexicality, the source element is processed, transformed. Layers of material and context are added, placing it within a newly formed subjective setting.
The resulting work takes the form of sequences of photographic montages (incorporating figurative and abstract elements, negative spaces of black and silence, and distortions), sound pieces, and digital installations that are experienced sensorially and transfigure in the presence of the viewer. They are infused with drama and mystique, charged with tensions between the personal and the social, and between what is or appears to be factual and staged fiction."
Background
Eran Tsafrir is British Israeli and lives and works in London. He studied contextual legal studies, aesthetics, and European Union structures and law at Warwick University (LL.B.), and University of Cambridge (LL.M., 1st Class). He later studied history of art at the Courtauld Institute (non-formal), and art practice and techniques at Central Saint Martins, amongst others. He holds a diploma in Art Profession & Ethics (Distinction) from the Art & Law Institute in London. He is a practising lawyer, specialising in technology and innovation and art law.
Inspired by this background, his practice seeks to illuminate the interrelations between real and digital aesthetic forms of expression and the contexts (technological, legal, political, economic, religious, ethical) in which they are made and displayed.
He is the founder of CX // conteXtism., a manifesto-driven initiative promoting aesthetic forms of expression that seek to unravel the complexity, intricacy, and multi-dimensionality of prevailing human and social reality and the forces that shape it.
