Oreet Ashery is an Israeli interdisciplinary artist based in London.
Career
Ashery received her BA in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University in 1992, followed by her MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins in 2000. Her work explores ideological, social and gender constructions through an interdisciplinary practice, spanning installation, video, live art and 2-D image making. Ashery's earlier work was often produced as a male character of her own creation, exploring gender relationships and those between woman and cultural identity. Ashery's most consistent character is Marcus Fisher, an orthodox Jewish man found in works such as Dancing with Men and Marcus Fisher | Say Cheese, but she has produced as other male characters, including an Arab man, a Norwegian postman and a black man. Ashery's more recent work has been based on Mayakovsky's 1921 play Mystery-Bouffe. This work confronts social and class biases alongside issues of political power and agency. Her performance at the Tate ModernThe World is Flooding in 2014 was followed by an exhibition Animal with a Language at Waterside Contemporary, both of which saw Ashery work with participants from Freedom from Torture, UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group, Portugal Prints, and others, to explore these themes. Ashery has exhibited and performed at various international venues, such as ZKM, Karlsruhe; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Overgaden, Copenhagen; DEPO, Istanbul; Whitstable Biennale; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Auto Italia South East, London; Freud Museum, London and Wellcome Collection, London producing works that explore her personal politics and identity in relation to wider social and cultural contexts. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the MAG Collection at the Ferens Gallery and the Tate. In 2020 Ashery was awarded a one-off Turner bursary of £10,000. These were awarded to ten artists instead of the usual Turner Prize, which was delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. She was selected for her contribution to Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery at the Wellcome Collection, which explored lived experiences of care and chronic illness. The jury were particularly moved by her new film Dying Under Your Eyes and the innovative web series Revisiting Genesis following two nurses who assist people actively preparing for death to create biographical slideshows serving as their posthumous digital legacy.
