Read the exhibition text in Hebrew
In Uri Gershuni’s solo exhibition “Night Night”, the night is not only a time of darkness and cessation, but also one of revelation, pain, and rebirth. Uri Gershuni, one of the prominent voices in contemporary art photography, weaves historical, mythological, and biographical elements into a powerful emotional and formal tapestry.
At the center of the exhibition stands a foundational moment in Western culture: the last night of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane—a moment of existential solitude, deep anxiety, and acceptance of impending death. Gershuni revisits this scene not as a historical illustrator, but as someone seeking to revive the image by other means—using contemporary tools. He employs artificial intelligence systems to generate fictional images of the “Agony in the Garden” scene, so well-known from art history. These images are not reconstructions of the past but rather poetic and emotional interpretations, the product of a technological imagination driven by a personal sense of urgency.
Additionally, Gershuni continues to “roll” the digital, AI-generated image back into the material through an analog process called ‘Lunagram’. In this process, the image is burned onto photographic paper through prolonged exposure to sunlight—without a camera. In contrast to traditional photography, in which light “reveals” the image from within darkness, here the sun slowly scorches the image, like a memory written over time. Thus, the sun—ironically—exposes what the night concealed.
But the night explored in the exhibition is also another night—a deeply personal one. During the work on the exhibition, Gershuni’s daughter was born prematurely. Her name is Laila (Hebrew for “night”), and for a time, she hovered between life and death. This experience—of tense waiting, fear, a night that wouldn’t end—infuses the exhibition with added emotional depth and charges the images with a constant movement between the mythical and the intimate, between faith and reason, between darkness and light. Jesus prays alone in the garden, a father clings to hope in an intensive care unit—two scenes, two vigils, both unfolding in the shadow of night, when it seems the light may never return.
Gershuni continues to wander through the nocturnal realm in his place of residence—the island of Mallorca, Spain. Under the full moon, he heads out with his camera and turns his gaze to the sky to capture the moon in its fullness. In this moonlight, glimpses of other landscapes appear—foreign, unfamiliar—yet the moon is always the same. Gershuni prints these images using a thermal printer on plain paper. The image is created through heat, not light, thereby echoing in another way the core of the exhibition: not just darkness and light, but also warmth, body, intimacy, and touch. The result is soft and fragile images, which do not claim to conquer time but rather document the delicacy within it.
“Night Night” is an exhibition about night as an emotional landscape: a night of mourning and loss, of waiting, of prayer, and of birth. Gershuni shapes from this material a new kind of garden—a new Gethsemane—a place where memory, image, and technology meet in sunlight and bodily warmth, to capture what is spoken, or whispered, in the night. The exhibition invites the viewer on a journey through images born of machines and revealed by the sun—but most of all, born of the soul: a soul trying to understand what night it is in which we are reborn, again and again.
About The Artist
Uri Gershuni (b. 1970, Tel Aviv) is one of the leading figures in contemporary Israeli art photography. He holds both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. His work explores the boundaries between history, memory, and image-making, blending traditional and experimental photographic techniques. Gershuni has exhibited extensively in Israel and internationally, and is known for his innovative use of photographic processes to engage with personal and cultural narratives. He has held solo exhibitions at prominent museums and galleries in Israel and abroad, including: “Earth to Earth”, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2024); “Apollo and the Chimney Sweeper”, Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2015); “Gone – There”, Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2020); “Thus Far Shell You Come”, Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2021); and others.
He is the winner of the 2018 The Minister of Culture Award in the fields of plastic art (2018), Minister of education and culture award for young Israeli artist (2000), Young photographers award on behalf of Haifa museum of art(2005), Heskia Hacmun award (2007) and Israel’s Minister of Culture ‘Art Encouragement’ Award (2012).
Through his work, Uri Gershuni develops a discourse on photography, researching where the real and the unreal converge. If on one side, Gershuni tries to understand the abstraction of data, on the other, he tries to control the images he creates with his own hands, ‘Apollo and the Chimney-sweeper’, 2015.