The Suite (212) Sessions, no. 17 - Oreet Ashery

In the wake of the coronavirus epidemic and shutting down of much of the UK's cultural life, we have decided to bring you a series of interviews with contemporary artists, writers, filmmakers and other cultural figures, conducted via Skype (so apologies for the diminished audio quality), about their practices, the political issues that inspire them and the socio-economic conditions that have shaped their work. In the seventeenth of these Sessions, Juliet talks to London-based visual artist and teacher Oreet Ashery. Born in Jerusalem in 1966 and educated at Sheffield Hallam University and Central Saint Martins, Oreet Ashery is a transdisciplinary artist who engages with biopolitical fiction, autoethnography, gender materiality and potential communities, making large-scale projects that span moving image, performance, music, writing and activism. Here, Ashery discusses her new text ‘We’ve been preparing for this our whole lives’ in respond to the Covid-19 outbreak; her recent film Dying Under Your Eyes (2019), commissioned by the Wellcome Collection for the Misbehaving Bodies exhibition that combined Ashery’s work with that of British artist Jo Spence (1934-1992); her Jarman Award-winning series Revisiting Genesis (2015-16) and its themes around death, dying and the digital; her Party for Freedom (2013), made in response to the rise of Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, and The World is Flooding (2014), based on a play by Vladimir Mayakovsky; and the implications of the widespread adoption of digital technology during lockdown for the art world and especially the art school. A full list of references for the programme, with links, can be found via our Patreon at www.patreon.com/suite212, and are available to $3 subscribers.