Nira Pereg

Nira Pereg, (b 1969, Tel Aviv) spent the 1990s in New York, where she  received her B.F.A from Cooper Union. On her return to Israel, she graduated from the Bezalel M.F.A studio program in Jerusalem, and has been exhibiting and teaching in Israel and internationally ever since.

Pereg’s 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”. She 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”. The merger of spirit and matter, as it  coexists in public spaces of religious/political/military importance, 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.”

Text by Nicolas Bourriaud “Nira Pereg’s Frontier Zones” as it appears in the monograph Nira Pereg, Abraham Abraham Sarah Sarah

Pereg’s works have been collected and exhibited at the TATE Modern London, the Center Pompidou Paris, PS1 New York, Hirshhorn Museum USA, HDK Berlin, KW Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, The Israel Museum Jerusalem, Haus Der Kunst München, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and LAX L.A. She took part in various international platforms such as the Shanghai Biennial of Art, Sao Paulo Biennial of Art, and Architecture Biennale La Biennale di Venezia 2013 and 2018.

Nira Pereg is a receiver of the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize for young artist 2010 and is a recipient of Israel’s minister of culture first senior video artist award 2016, and the Lia Van Leer Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival 2016.