Balancing on shifting ground: Migratory aesthetics and recuperation of presence in Ori Gersht’s video installation on reflection

This article looks at On Reflection, a video installation by the London-based artist Ori Gersht, in light of the artist’s transcultural or ‘travelling’ position between the United Kingdom, where Gersht has been residing and practising art since 1989, and his native country of Israel. Through close analysis of a single video installation by a British/Israeli ‘radicant’, to adopt Nicolas Bourriaud’s suggestive nomenclature, the article asks how the global migratory condition is affecting contemporary art and aesthetic experience. Focusing on sensory and motor aspects of viewers’ engagement with the installation, the article proposes an approach to the political through the prism of aisthêsis, or sensory engagement. It further suggests that On Reflection evinces a cautious effort to augment observers’ sense of bodily presence, which, however, does not outlast the brief duration of the gallery visit. The multidisciplinary approach offered here combines close attention to aesthetics, in Jill Bennett’s sense of ‘what art does’, with insights from phenomenological film theory and from cognitive neuroscience. It is argued that this is a productive critical gateway through which to investigate the migratory turn in global art.