Jo Spence & Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies

January 9, 2019

Jo Spence & Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies

Wellcome Collection

30 May 2018 – 26 January 2020

Animal with a Language, solo exhibition at Campagne Première gallery, Berlin, 5th February – 14th March, 2015

February 11, 2015

2014-15 Fine Art Fellow, Stanley Picker Gallery

October 27, 2014

2014 Fine Art Fellow, Stanley Picker Gallery

The World is Flooding

August 6, 2014

Oreet Ashery: Group performance, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, Saturday 12 July 2014, 17.00 – 18.30

The World is Flooding is a performance based on Mystery Bouffe, a play by Mayakovsky, written in 1921 for the anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution. Over several months artist Oreet Ashery worked with a group of participants to write, produce, and direct a performance. The elements of the performance are influence by Russian futurism, including Malevich’s set designs for Victory Over the Sun and Zaum poetry.

Animal with a Language, solo exhibition, Waterside Contemporary, London, October- December 2014

July 20, 2014

Londonwaterside contemporary is pleased to present Animal with a Language, a solo exhibition by Oreet Ashery

Visiting Professor Royal College of Art, Painting Department

March 25, 2013

TJ Demos’ Essay: The Unfinished revolution: Oreet Ashery’s Party for Freedom

The essay can be found on the Artangel website and as sprinted booklet with the DVD Party for Freedom in Unbound.

 “…Ashery’s video interweaves complex elements of experimental performance, nude theatre and political satire, punk music and trash aesthetics, in order to deconstruct, via cutting parody, the paradoxical ideology that joins the freedoms of sexual transgression to the xenophobic and murderous intolerance of outsiders

Party for Freedom solo show at Overgaden, Copenhagen, 6 September-27 October 2013

For her first solo exhibition in Denmark, Ashery presents the installation Party for Freedom, a moving-image audiovisual album of 10 tracks. Traversing the territories of Western leftist sentiments emergent in 1960s and 70s’ experimental and avant-garde productions, and current rightwing and far-right populist claims positing Islam and immigration as a threat to imagined nationhood, the work questions at once unconscious and politically motivated trajectories and currencies associated with Western freedom. Exploring performances of liberation, trash aesthetics and political nakedness, Party for Freedom responds to meshed Orientalist depictions in current mediascapes, and to the eccentric series of events characterizing the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Theo van Gogh in 2004, and the ensuing popularity of the far-right Partij voor de Vrijheid.

For more information, please click here.

Extensive feature on Party for Freedom and other works, The Wire, March 2014

March 24, 2013

Unfinished revolutions: Oreet Ashery’s Party For Freedom

March 2014, Nathan Budzinski. “…It’s a mood of vagueness, but Party For Freedom is definitely not at peace with that ambience. It is an attempt to punch through it forcibly, with feeling”.

Solo Show, Beijing: Raging Balls

April 10, 2010

June 12th – July 12th, 2010

Other Gallery: Beijing Space, 706 North 3rd Street, Jiuxianqiao Road, 798 Art Zone Chaoyang District, Beijing China

Raging Balls asks how should artists and audiences deal with politics, increased state control and real life, as insiders and outsiders, and how we are experiencing rage today.

Ashery started to think about Raging Balls after she witnessed three policemen using unnecessary force against a person who had nothing on him, as part of a ‘Stop and Search’ procedures. Influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s influential work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Raging Balls is about being a biological body, as opposed to a body with rights, outside the law. Palestinians under the Israeli occupation, are a good example of the homo Sacer, they are controlled by the state, yet, there are no laws to protect them, or even consider them citizens. Raging Balls talks about the complex relationships between increased global state control and security apparatuses, and the illusion that art can somehow protect us from this. In a schizophrenic manner Raging Balls also talks about the art world’s obsession with reality, war and conflicts. Political art comes under scrutiny in an ambiguous manner.

Raging Balls asks how should artists deal with politics and real life as insiders and outsiders.

For more information, please click here.

Solo Show, Shanghai: The Beautiful Jew

June 19th – July 19th, 2010

Other Gallery Shanghai Space, 50 Moganshan Road, Building 9, Shanghai

This show is an installation comprised of works that Ashery performed, filmed, photographed, painted, assembled, stitched and collected since leaving Israel in 1987. Ashery herself is the represented subject within many of these works. This collection of works has never been seen together before, and some of the works have never been exhibited publicly, whilst others have been widely shown.

Despite Ashery’s continuous artistic engagement with her Jewish and Israeli identity as a form of resistance to the occupation of Palestine, for this show Ashery decided to pick works that conceptually exist outside the notion of Israel. The show is titled The Beautiful Jew for that reason. For the premise of this show, the Jew can only be deemed beautiful outside Israel, outside Zionism, it can no longer be regarded beautiful, and a militant occupier of other people, at the same time.

In this show, the notion of the beautiful Jew, is used in a poetic and performative sense; the Jew as an immigrant, as different, as marked, defined, undefined, redefined, childish, aestheticised, gendered, exotic, politicized, sexualised, an object of fear and desire.

For more information, please click here.