•Uriel Orlow uses diverse artforms to investigate where history, place and memory intersect and resonate in the present, whether in archived documents, the physical body or in geographical locations themselves. Rather than reconstruct history as the past, for which the viewer may feel little or no responsibility, Orlow’s work traces history’s charge in the present so that the viewer may experience its living continuity. His work asks what are the terms in which experience, either overwhelmingly traumatic, such as the Holocaust or colonial oppression, or learned, as in classical music training, is contained. What are the means by which we classify, categorise and assimilate knowledge, both intellectually and physically? Like points in a stellar constellation, Orlow’s work shapes connections between these systems, making what seems untranslatable, both poetic and precise. Cherry Smyth, art critic

•It is not only present and current events that can be ‘read’ through the process of making artworks and exhibitions. It is equally possible to ‘read’ or investigate the past, taking soundings of what lies beneath the surface, mapping the terrain that lies beyond reach, that is not immediately visible or tangible, or has been overlooked. This is what Uriel Orlow does so effectively in The Benin Project (2007). Through the interplay of the discrete but inter-related elements that make up the work, Orlow explores the neglected narratives and contexts that surround the so-called ‘Benin Bronzes’ and raises questions about ownership, identity and belonging that encompass contemporary political and social realities beyond these particular artefacts. Most importantly, perhaps, Orlow proposes a route for negotiating geographical space and historical time which avoids the traditional linear, progressive trajectory of Western scientific and historical thought and instead, maps out a spiral trail that moves from the past to the present and back again, from one physical location to another, retracing some steps but also defining new ones that open up fresh and unexpected vistas. Gilane Tawadros 2007

• Orlow suggests an attempt to re-engage with memory, as complex articulations that can be determined spatially and temporally. Rather than focusing on monuments that fix events in the past, memory is articulated in Orlow's work as an active process taking place in the present. Dan Smith in Stets gern für Sie beschäftigt (Berlin: ifa, 2005), pp. 24-25. Full Text

• Orlow’s projects tend to uncouple themselves from earlier memory-art by distancing themselves from the problem of identity situated between the sufficiently familiar poles ‘individual’ and ‘collective’. Instead he starts from the possibility of a third position, and from the mutability of collective and individual identity resulting from their crossover. The basic condition for this is the active participation of the viewer. [Orlow’s work is marked by] a refusal to submit to the - frequently demonstrative - dramatic expression. A mode of reception is thus instigated that might be compared to tracking down traces. […] The stimulating character of Orlow's memory art lies finally, and rather paradoxically, in the total objectivity of his aesthetic; a filmic rhetoric which constantly switches between documentation and fiction, concretion and abstraction. Orlow adopts a new form of memory-art, aware of a broad range of themes, media and ‘visual languages’, but which formerly had treated objectivity and stimulus as separate forms of expression. These formal-aesthetic innovations introduce a complexity of content that combines different semantic and sensory fields. Kai-Uwe Hemken, Between Stimulus and Objectivity: Notes on the memory-art of Uriel Orlow, in Deposits (Greenbox, 2006)

• In Uriel Orlow's sechsminütigen Video Descent – auf hebräisch: Yerida, zu deutsch: Emigration – spricht eine hochschwangere Israelin über ihr Dasein als Emigrantin in der Schweiz. Ein treffendes Beispiel dafür, weshalb Videos eine Berechtigung haben, weshalb sie klassischen Filmdramaturgien die Show stehlen. Es ist authentisch. Es subsumiert Bestandteile von Schrecken, schwarzem Humor (qua Zynismus als Überlebensstrategie) und Todesgespenstern. In der Schweiz lebt es sich ruhig, zu ruhig. Das quirlige Leben in Israel wird vermisst. Dort, wo, wenn wieder einmal ein Bombenattentat stattgefunden hat, am Telefon darüber gescherzt wird, auf die Straße zu gehen, um „Pieces“ aufzusammeln, Leichenteile. Hier kommt alles zusammen: Das Leben im Bauch, der Heimatverlust, die Alltagserfahrung des Terrors, die schuldbeladene Sicherheit im Exil. Eine Identität, die, so scheint es, gebildet wird, in dem sich verschiedene Attribute willkürlich eines Körpers bemächtigen. Der Körper als Durchgangsstation. Vielleicht ist das eine taugliche Interpretation für Globalisierung. Nicht nur, dass ein Körper per Flugzeug reist oder Unmengen von Daten verschickt werden etc., sondern, dass ein Körper – wo auch immer er sich befindet – von den transitorischen Realitäten nach Belieben besetzt wird. Abwehrchance: Keine. Ralph Findeisen, Artnet.de (30 November 2006) Translation

• Uriel Orlow has created a beautiful and poetic installation for this exhibition [Around the World in Eighty Days]... His Midday/Midnight (66° 33'), 2006 conists of a two-screen video showing a car journey across a bridge in the arctic at midday and midnight, both filmed on the longest and the shortest day of the year. The result is a time-space confusion caused by the presence or absence of light. Rikke Hansen, Art Monthly, issue 298 (July-August, 2006), pp. 26-27.

• In Concert, made with two musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, London, does away with not only the score (internalised in both the memory and in the physical movements of playing), but the instruments. […] Absorbed by the performance, we become almost unaware that no instruments are present. And then there is an unforgettable pause when the cellist rests both hands on her knees and the invisible cello, made so present by her gestures, disappears. In Concert is a speculative artwork, not a formal study of cognition. But artworks share with science the occasional need for thought-experiments, and this one presents evidence of a further development of Orlow's work, that exceeds by far in effect and fascination what the initial premise suggests; not least by its social and mimetic implications and pleasures. The non-musician, seeing and hearing this work, is tempted to imitate, if only in a restrained way, some of the movements made by those who have learnt them so well. Ian Hunt, Performance, exhibition catalogue (St Prex: Wings, 2006). Full Text

• Orlow's installation confronts us with the distinction between memory as locus and material inscription, and memory as recall of the past, between the externality of the support—the boxes and books, and the house itself, containing both the physical supports of memory, and the direct traces of the past, such as photographs—and the voices of testimony. […] Orlow's tracking shots in Housed Memory suggest at once continuity and discontinuity, the infinite line, but one that goes nowhere, and is ruptured again and again. Equally, the viewer is not allowed to step back, there is no subject-centered view of the whole. The still images of Inside the Archive also provide no more than a series of fragments. And when a stable viewpoint is given in The Wiener Library, London it is from outside the building, and compromised by being associated with surveillance. This is appropriate to the event to which this particular archive, the Wiener Library, is largely dedicated. But it is also overwhelming—and some of the testimonies of the people who work there attest to this. Michael Newman, Archive, Testimony and Trace: Uriel Orlow's Housed Memory, in Deposits (Berlin/Zurich: The Greenbox, 2006), pp 65-83.