Nathan Ishar is a German photographer and video artist based in Brussels and Cologne.

Nathan graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp in 2020.

‘Permeable Thruths’ is a sequence of 12 slide projections that have a visual underlayer connected to apocalyptic storytelling through religious connotations.

Nathan took these pictures while experiencing different religious practices, participating in events like pilgrimages in Armenia, Belgium, Indonesia, and Germany.

Nathan sees his practice as a practical philosopher’s task to connect and learn about the world.

Yet instead of only thinking, the artist is also tasked to engage with reality. The same questions of ‘being’ apply, and Nathan searches for these places and practices related to it and engages with them in a ritualistic way.

Camus, Nietzsche, or the Bible, their stories and ways of thinking create a way for Nathan to analyze how we are still influenced perhaps unknowingly by our past.

This existentialist questioning of life is very appealing in the artist’s being and work.

It feels like Nathan can almost touch the experience of life and time with light. In this way, Nathan is reminiscent of the great Tarkovski.

Using a color flashlight or projection instead of printing, the light inside Nathan’s work creates a sacral atmosphere in color. It creates an experience of a ‘fleeting moment’, ephemerality that is cinematic.

The sequence and order of the images in the slide projection are Nathan’s way of narrating a story. It is Nathan’s manipulation of the viewer in a documentary style of photography entirely focussed on the subjectivity of experience.