Oreet Ashery, Marcus Fisher’s Wake, 2000
Oreet Ashery
Marcus Fisher’s Wake

Oreet Ashery (*1966, Israel, UK) is a visual artist who works across established arts institutions and grassroots social contexts. Ashery’s distinct multiplatform projects combine video, performance, sound, assemblage, and writing. The work is situated and expands the remits of contemporary practice. Ashery narrates stories of marginal and precarious identities, combining autoethnography, collective-knowledge, and biopolitical fiction. Ashery was commissioned in 2022 by KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, to produce a film that will feature some of the highways in and around Jerusalem. In recent years the work questioned how the boundaries between illness; life and death; body and self are affected by digital technologies. Ashery won the Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis and in 2020 she was the recipient of the Turner Prize Bursary for her exhibition Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, at the Wellcome Collection. The exhibition included her newly commissioned film Dying Under Your Eyes, exploring intimate surveillance. In 2019 Ashery published her monograph How We Die Is How We Live Only More So with Mousse publishing, co-edited with George Vasey. Ashery is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

artist's website: oreetashery.net

This mock–documentary fictionalises the life of Oreet Ashery’s alter ego, the orthodox Jewish man Marcus Fisher. The grungy film uses footage from interventions, performances and home videos.

Courtesy Oreet Ashery
Document media
Video, colour, sound, 16:00 min

Issue date
2000

Tags
be-coming, conflict, de/construct identities, masculinity, queer/drag, roleplay