Statement

Uriel Orlow’s art bears witness to his concern for the possibility of having an intimate and ethical relationship to the world. His works explore the roles language, the image and memory play in structuring private and collective human experience. Working across a range of media, Orlow brings disparate places into correspondence, following associative and conceptual threads that encompass geography, politics, history and his own biography. Engaged in exploring blind-spots in the production of knowledge, and committed to both an aesthetics of the given and the restorative potential of the concentrated gaze, Orlow’s works have a clarity and insistence of vision which is both analytical and emotional; through the construction of carefully calibrated and framed films or photographs that focus on the specific, Orlow’s work opens out to universal concerns.

Biography

Orlow's work has been included in exhibitions and film-festivals internationally and is represented in private and public collections. In 2008 he won a prestigious Swiss Art Award at Art Basel. Solo exhibitions in 2008 include The Jewish Museum New York, Blancpain Art Contemporain Geneva, Argos Brussles and London Gallery West. Recent group exhibitions and screenings include The Whole World at Tate Moderon, the Third Guangzhou Triennial at Guangdong Museum of Art, New Work UK at Whitechapel Gallery London, Tempo Tempo at Opelvillen Rüsselheim, Artfutures at Bloomberg Space London, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Retracing Territories at Fri-Art Kunsthalle Fribourg, New Lands at BFI Southbank London, Videonale at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Around the World in 80 days at Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London, Arnolfini Bristol and ifa-Galerie, Berlin.

Publications include the monographs The Benin Project (London: future perfect, 2007), Deposits (Berlin: Greenbox, 2006) and Re: the archive, the image, and the very dead sheep (London: Double agents, 2004). Recently published essays include 'How To Do Things with Words and a Camera' in Episode (Artwords, 2008), ‘The Dialectical Image’ in The Cinematic, ed. D. Campany (MIT: 2007), ‘Latent Archives, Roving Lens’, in Ghosting: the role of the archive in contemporary film and video (Picture This: 2006), ‘Talk is Cheap: Some Notes on Freedom of Speech and the Ethics of Listening’, in 1+1+1 (Double agents: 2005).

Uriel Orlow was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1973 and works in London and Zürich. He studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, followed by post-graduate studies in Philosophy, Literature and Aesthetics at the University of Geneva and doctoral research under the supervision of Michael Newman, Mark Nash, Andrew Benjamin and Joram ten Brink at The Slade School of Art (UCL) and at the University of the Arts, London where he completed his PhD in Fine Art in 2002.

Uriel Orlow taught on the BA and MA Fine Art courses at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and Goldsmith College, University of London from 1997 to 2005. He currently holds an AHRC research fellowship in Creative Arts at the University of Westminster. He is also a member of Double agents, a group composed of the artists/curators Anne Tallentire (joint convenor), Graham Ellard (joint convenor), Lisa Panting, Uriel Orlow, Jaki Irvine and Adam Chodzko.Together with Michal Sapir he co-curates the quarterly Betsey's Salon, an interdisciplinary quarterly arts salon in London.

Full CV...