Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Oreet Ashery artist

Oreet Ashery was born into a Jewish family in West Jerusalem, Israel in 1966. Ashery immigrated to England in the 1980s where they gained their further art education, including a PhD from Reading University. Ashery is an established inter-disciplinary, multimedia artist and an academic, who has exhibited and taught extensively, working with themes around identity, gender, culture, death, and illness, among others. Their performance, 'The World is Flooding' was presented at Tate Modern, London in 2014.

Born: 1966 Jerusalem, Israel

Year of Migration to the UK: 1980


Biography

Mixed media and interdisciplinary artist, Oreet Ashery was born in West Jerusalem, Israel in 1966. Ashery’s father came from a Jewish family who lived in the Muslim Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City for several generations, while their mother’s family came from a religious Jewish background and lived in Jerusalem's orthodox neighbourhoods. Ashery immigrated to England in the late 1980s, first settling in Leicester. They earned their Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University in 1992 and their Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Central St Martins in 2000, followed by a PhD at the Reading School of Art at the University of Reading, completed in 2020.

Ashery has an interdisciplinary approach and works across a wide range of media, including video, installation, assemblage, 2D images, and internet content, as well as site-specific performance and audience interaction. Ashery’s work moves through mainstream, grassroots, and formal settings, exploring themes of the body, illness, collective life, self-narrative, death, gender, ideological and gender constructions, and the digital realm, while drawing on their own personal history and identity. Marked by a blend of speculative storytelling and wit, their art practice often finds itself in spaces that are hopeful, thought-provoking, and strangely out of place. At the beginning of their career, they often published their work under the male identity and character of Marcus Fisher, a religious Jewish man who reappears in their works, as a device to explore the role of gender identity and expression in art. Ashery’s focus on masculinity, along with the portrayal of male characters, aims to investigate the fluidity between genders, as well as the links between women and cultural identity. Ashery's practice occasionally echoes the historical avant-garde, employing what they describe as ‘trash aesthetics,’ which, as they explain, ‘has always been a big part of my visual language. I was brought up surrounded by unfinished buildings and broken pavements and huge amount of plastic furnishing and household goods,’ (Ashery quoted in Gogarty, 2014, p. 3).

Ashery has exhibited and performed widely in the UK and internationally. Their performance The World is Flooding at Tate Modern in 2014 was followed by the exhibition Animal with a Language at London's Waterside Contemporary. The World is Flooding was an adaptation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s play, Mystery Bouffe, written in 1918/1921, and featured participants from Freedom from Torture, LGIG (an LGBTQ+ immigration group), Portugal Prints (an arts project that is part of the MIND charity), and other individuals. The project examined themes from the original play - class bias and power - through the lens of cleanliness and uncleanliness. In 2015, their collection work was included in Ben Uri's centenary exhibition, Out of Chaos, held at London's Somerset House, and which included works ranging from late 19th-century paintings to 21st-century new media, to offer a visual exploration of Britain’s artistic and social history, through the prism of artists predominantly of Jewish heritage and their, often, complex cultural backgrounds. Ashery's work also featured in earlier Ben Uri exhibitions, including Summer Show and Recent Acquisitions (both 2006). In 2015, Ashery held a solo exhibition at the ICA which was connected to a multi-stage project exploring the theme of death in everyday life. It featured a performance by the Death Metal band Anoxide, an installation of various artworks, and a weeklong programme, including film screenings, creating a space for reflection on mortality and creative expression. In 2019-20, Ashery held a two-person exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, in conjunction with the works of the photographer, Jo Spence. Entitled Misbehaving Bodies, it explored the theme of body, cancer, healthcare regimes, death and chronic illness in the digital age and how illness shapes one’s identity. The exhibition was complemented with a solo performance by Ashery.

Ashery has received a number of awards, including the Jarman Award in 2017 for Revisiting Genesis, which was exhibited in London and elsewhere (2016–18). In 2020, they were awarded a Turner Bursary for their contribution to the exhibition Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery. (Due to the pandemic, the bursary replaced the Turner Prize that year.) Ashery has also held several academic roles, including Senior Lecturer, Art Department, Goldsmiths University; Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL); Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art (2013–15), and the Stanley Picker Fellow in Fine Art at Kingston University (2014). More recently, they have been appointed Director of the MFA programme at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2019-ongoing) and a Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Oxford, as well as Director of Studies in Fine Art at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Oreet Ashey lives and works in London. Their work is held in several public collections in the UK, including Ben Uri Collection, Ferens Art Gallery, and Norwich Castle Museum.

Related books

  • Natasha Eves, 'Performing Reparative Craft: Oreet Ashery’s Passing through Metal', Cloth and Culture, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2024, pp. 571-583
  • Oreet Ashery and George Vasey, eds., Oreet Ashery: How We Die Is How We Live Only More So (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2019)
  • Johanna Linsley, 'The Artist Is No Longer Present: Encounter, Assembly and Withdrawal in the Work of Oreet Ashery', Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity, 2020, p. 118
  • Sarah MacDougall, Rachel Dickson, Richard Cork, eds., Out of Chaos: Ben Uri: 100 Years in London (London: Ben Uri, 2015)
  • Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘Irreplaceable’, Art Monthly, No. 381, 2014, pp. 1-4.
  • Eirini Kartsaki, 'Mis-appropriation and Re-appropriation: An Interview with Oreet Ashery', Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2014, pp. 225-240
  • Oreet Ashery, The World Is Flooding (London: Tate, 2014)
  • David Burrows, ed., Performing/Knowing (Birmingham: ARTicle Press/Birmingham City University, 2010)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Central St Martins (student)
  • Exeter College, University of Oxford (Director of Studies in Fine Art)
  • Kingston University (Stanley Picker Fellow)
  • Sheffield Hallam University (student)
  • The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford (Director of MFA programme)
  • University of Reading (student )

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery (two person exhibition and solo performance), Wellcome Collection, London (2019-2020)
  • How we die is how we live only more so (solo exhibition), Centre of Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic (2019)
  • Revisiting Genesis (solo exhibition), Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2015)
  • Out of Chaos (group show), Ben Uri Collection, Somerset House, London (2015)
  • Animal with a Language (solo exhibition), Waterside Contemporary, London (2014)
  • The World Is Flooding Oreet Ashery (group performance), Tate Modern, London (2014)
  • Oreet Ashery (solo exhibition) Pristine Gallery, Mexico (2012)
  • The Beautiful Jew (solo exhibition), Other Gallery, Shanghai, China (2010)
  • Recent Acquisitions, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2006)
  • Summer Show (group show), Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2006)
  • Say Cheese (solo exhibition), Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool (2003)
  Oreet Ashery
   
Ben Uri collection

Oreet Ashery in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Oreet Ashery]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Oreet Ashery] in the Ben Uri Library