Over the past 20 years Pereg’s work dealt with questions that emerge from the unavoidable synergy of spirit and matter, theory and practice.
Nira Pereg (born Israel, 1969) multichannel video installations challenge the status quo of any territory she immerses herself in. She anchors her work in documentary practice, developing her own “play of resolutions''. Pereg often employs multi-channel presentations which both estrange the events from their origin, and “reenact” them within the exhibition space. This particular aesthetic intervention heightens a constant discomfort with “the way things are”.
Over the past 20 years Pereg’s work dealt with questions that emerge from the unavoidable synergy of spirit and matter, theory and practice. Her work both reveals and questions behavioural protocols, as they coexist in liminal spaces of geopolitical, religious, ideological and ethical importance. These border zones serves as a platform for Pereg’s interest and involvement in the social manifestations of power structures which influence our lives.
“Nira Pereg works by immersing herself in contexts that are both familiar and conflictual, thereby doing away with the notions of proximity and distance. This apparently distant eye that Nira Pereg systematically applies to her subjects is the very form of her commitment. To show the mechanics of exclusion, to set up one’s camera in front of the protocol of separation, as she does in Abraham Abraham Sarah Sarah, is to do much more than merely document a situation, it is to follow the thread of life running through socio-political mechanisms, to undertake an archaeology of the present.”
Nicolas Bourriaud “Nira Pereg’s Frontier Zones” as it appears in the monograph Nira Pereg, Abraham Abraham Sarah Sarah (Publisher: Éditions Musée d’art et d'histoire du Judaïsme. October 2014)
Her work has been exhibited worldwide, and is represented in the collections of many museums, including the Center Pompidou Paris, PS1 New York, Hirshhorn Museum USA, ZKM Karlsruhe, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The national Gallery of Canada, .Princeton University and TATE modern, London.
She currently lives and works in Tel Aviv