Oreet Ashery
Oreet Ashery is a Jerusalem born (1966) artist based in London who works in a variety of disciplines ranging from photography and video to installation/live art. Her work primarily explores ideological, social and gender constructions in our society and the socio-political morals of Israeli culture. She grew up in a traditional Jewish home and in her lecture she talked about being alienated from the rest of society that lived just across the road from her. Her early work included Ashery, herself, dressed as a male character to help her explore gender relationships. The most captivating work for me was ‘Self Portraits as
Marcus Fisher’ 2000 (see fig 1). The photographs are actually cited as being by Manuel
Vason (Photographer/artist born in Padua, Italy in 1974) - how can they be self-portraits if she did not take the photographs? What interested me was the persona she created and how she expressed ‘his’ identity in the polaroids. She also did many public experiments to push the boundaries of cultural customs and when she dresses as ‘Marcus Fisher’ no one suspects that she is not an ordinary Jewish man. In her piece ‘Dancing With Men’ 2003 (see fig 2) Ashery went to Israel; in May, to the memorial celebrations of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai, the author of ‘The Zohar’ .The celebration call
s for all the orthodox men to dance intensely the night before the anniversary of the
Rabbi’s passing. The event is exclusively for men and if the men had found out that Ashery was in fact a woman they would have looked on this as an act of ‘Gender Terrorism’.
Her latest work explores the notion of freedom, class biases and political power. I found her new work really fascinating in how she explores these notions through live art. ‘The World Is Flooding’ 2014 (see fig 3) is a performance piece that was shown at the Tate Modern and draws influence from a play called ‘Mystery Bouffe’ by Mayakovsky written in 1921. Many of the aesthetics are inspired by Russian futurism and the narrative deals with the themes of the absurdity of politics, class biases and power. There is a lot of symbolism within the work and many different ways to interpret and relate it to today’s society. For example the Eskimo at the start of the performance;
who discovers the ‘flood’, can be called a whistle-blower in today’s world. I found these concepts intriguing and the work does raise many issues of who are the ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ and what is the ‘flood’ we are trying to stop? In my eyes I see the ‘flood’ as a flood of information that flows from our corrupt society and the whistle-blower has exposed this information to both the clean and unclean and we build a ‘boat’ which I consider to be a shelter from the grim reality the ‘flood’ caused.
“The Clean and Unclean were proving to be complicated entities; poets, artists, thieves, a corrupt elite, those in need of help, outsiders, hypocritical politicians; all mixing class, race, gender and sexual orientation. To complicate things further, The Clean and the Unclean tend to merge, sometimes becoming one and the same.” – The World Is Flooding
After talking about ‘The World Is Flooding’ she went on to discuss her body of work titled ‘Party For Freedom’ 2013 (see fig 3 and fig 4). My favourite piece from this body of
work is titled ‘The Space For Freedom Is Getting Smaller And Less Transparent’ 2013 which was shown in Copenhagen. The work was a solo exhibition and it explored the notions of freedom and liberation. The exhibition consisted of a three-screen video projection and a participatory work. The participatory work in particular caught my attention as it dealt with the question “Are we ever really free?”. The installation involved the participants entering a built structure with transparent plastic walls and given buckets of paint and brushes (see fig 5). The participants were free to do as they pleased with the paint and after every couple of weeks there would be an additional transparent structure constructed inside the previous one. The first structure gave the partakers the option of black, white, yellow, blue and red
paints whereas the second structure only offered black and white. The concept behind this installation really interested me as I am exploring freedom of expression as part of my practice and Ashery’s ‘The Space For Freedom Is Getting Smaller And Less Transparent’ demonstrated the essence of the dilemma of “Are we ever really free?” in a really interesting and exciting way, showing that those in power control our freedom and that we; as individuals, can only have a certain amount of actual freedom.
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