Ori Gersht

'Pomegranate,' started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.

Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.

It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.