Finalist 2020
Roei Greenberg
Roei Greenberg (b.1985) is a London based, Israeli artist, currently studying at the Royal College of Art (MA photography 2018-2020).
His practice is concerned with landscape as a complex intersection between culture and geography. The effects of human activity on land, political borders and ecology are amongst the issues investigated in his works. He uses large format camera and film to create multi-layered photographic perspectives that invites a compelling yet critical reading of landscape and its representation.
Greenberg has been the recipient of multiple awards and nominations, amongst them are the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019, Voies Off 2019, The Discovery Award 2018, Prix Levallois 2018, Critical Mass 2017, Meitar Photography Award 2017, Local Testimony 2017, Magnum Photography Awards 2017, and the Sony World Photography Awards 2014. His work has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions including: Aperture Gallery, NYC; South London Gallery, London; Leeds Art Gallery; The Royal Photographic Society House, Bristol; The Benaki Museum, Athens and The Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv amongst others.
His practice is concerned with landscape as a complex intersection between culture and geography. The effects of human activity on land, political borders and ecology are amongst the issues investigated in his works. He uses large format camera and film to create multi-layered photographic perspectives that invites a compelling yet critical reading of landscape and its representation.
Greenberg has been the recipient of multiple awards and nominations, amongst them are the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019, Voies Off 2019, The Discovery Award 2018, Prix Levallois 2018, Critical Mass 2017, Meitar Photography Award 2017, Local Testimony 2017, Magnum Photography Awards 2017, and the Sony World Photography Awards 2014. His work has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions including: Aperture Gallery, NYC; South London Gallery, London; Leeds Art Gallery; The Royal Photographic Society House, Bristol; The Benaki Museum, Athens and The Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv amongst others.
English Encounters, 2020
The heightened consciousness about the destruction of the environment makes us increasingly aware of what, in different ways, has always pertained: landscape is a political text. Land ownership is not just a matter of wealth; who decides where we build our homes, how we grow our food, how much space we leave for nature? After all, we’re in the throes of an epoch-making environmental crisis, with our land scoured of species and natural habitats after decades of intensive farming.
After years of confronting the Israeli landscape, its geography, historical narratives and my own biography, I left Israel in 2018. Far away from the politics ‘left behind’, I found myself once again drawn to questions of land and power, belonging and legitimacy.
English Encounters
The rural walk is a well-known English cultural practice. Though it may be civil, the act of walking itself is rooted in an ideology from my own cultural background; to walk the land is to know the land, and therefore suggests belonging, entitlement and ownership… I begin to survey the English countryside, becoming familiar with the island’s geography, an act of mapping that refers to imperial and colonial histories.
Pertaining to Romanticism, I appropriate the visual rules of the picturesque; traditionally used to create an illusion of social and natural harmony… The dramatic light and weather conditions combined with forensic attention to details and on-site interventions; intend to provoke the ambiguous feelings of seduction and alienation; poetic and luring yet tinged with irony, seeking to disrupt traditional modes of representation in a place where land ownership and social hierarchy, have shaped the form and perception of the landscape for centuries.
After years of confronting the Israeli landscape, its geography, historical narratives and my own biography, I left Israel in 2018. Far away from the politics ‘left behind’, I found myself once again drawn to questions of land and power, belonging and legitimacy.
English Encounters
The rural walk is a well-known English cultural practice. Though it may be civil, the act of walking itself is rooted in an ideology from my own cultural background; to walk the land is to know the land, and therefore suggests belonging, entitlement and ownership… I begin to survey the English countryside, becoming familiar with the island’s geography, an act of mapping that refers to imperial and colonial histories.
Pertaining to Romanticism, I appropriate the visual rules of the picturesque; traditionally used to create an illusion of social and natural harmony… The dramatic light and weather conditions combined with forensic attention to details and on-site interventions; intend to provoke the ambiguous feelings of seduction and alienation; poetic and luring yet tinged with irony, seeking to disrupt traditional modes of representation in a place where land ownership and social hierarchy, have shaped the form and perception of the landscape for centuries.
