Oreet Ashery
First instalment at Metal, Edge Hill Station, Liverpool, on Thursday 11 October 7pm
The first instalment of Party for Freedom by Oreet Ashery is presented as part of Metal’s Liverpool Biennial 2012 programme at Cafe Valise – a pop up arts venue and cafe.
Party for Freedom is an urgent artistic interrogation of the visual, cultural and political values associated with Western Freedom and an attempt to foreground moments of unconscious recognition. Is our political imagination debunked? What is it that we are trying to protect and from whom? Drawing upon histories of experimental performance, theatre and film, satire, biopolitics and popular media, Party for Freedom is a feature-length moving-image work presented as an audiovisual album of 10 interconnected tracks, all with original music including Timo-Juhani Kyllönen, Morgan Quaintance and Woolf. Loosely based on Mayakovsky’s evocative 1921 play Myster-Bouffe, telling the story of the Clean and the Unclean, the work responds to the political assassinations of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Theo van Gogh in 2004, followed by a public surge of nationalistic and anti-Islamic sentiments and the ensuing popularity of Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician and leader of the far-right Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom).
Party for Freedom, the artwork, poignantly and humorously examines populist claims and mediascapes that run Europe with emptied scenes of imagined nationhood and where immigration and Islam are portrayed as an ‘outside-in’ threat to Western values of Freedom. In collaboration with artists across a range of disciplines and developed through a series of workshops, Party for Freedom features an irreverent and animated array of characters and scenarios filmed in the lush settings of a 13th century church in the English countryside. Engaging with the cultural productions of 1960s-70s’ Naked as a Jaybird, Kollektivnye Destviya and Scratch Orchestra, Party for Freedom uses nakedness, trash aesthetics and collective sound and action to explore performances of liberation; their histories, currencies and potential futurities. Colette Bailey, Artistic Director of Metal, said “Oreet has created a new work that tackles head-on one of the most challenging political and social issues of the day”.
Metal are delighted to preview the work as part of our Biennial programme before it is presented in London by Artangel in spring 2013. Party for Freedom will be premiered at Metal on 11 October 2012 at 7pm with a screening of 3 of the audiovisual tracks accompanied with live music composed by Timo-Juhani Kyllönen and played by Rafal Luc on the accordion and Anna Hashimoto on clarinet. Metal is working in partnership with the artist, Liverpool Biennial 2012 and Arts Council England (ACE) to present this work. Party for Freedom is supported by: Art Council England, Kone Foundation, and Performance Matters, a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Live Art Development Agency, financially assisted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Thanks to Laura Godfrey Isaacs for the use of Rishangles Old Church
Click here for tickets to Party for Freedom and all other events at Café Valise.
Oreet Ashery Biograpy
Oreet Ashery is a visual artist, internationally renowned for her ongoing interrogations of art, selfhood, politics, and representation, particularly in the context of minority discourses. Ashery’s practice spans performance, still and moving-image and objects, as well as participatory events, platforms and situations. Ashery exhibits, performs, intervenes and screens her work extensively in an international context, including biennials, museums, galleries, contemporary art-centers and festivals, as well as alternative and context-specific sites including curators’ bedrooms and a men-only religious celebration. Ashery’s work has been published and discussed in numerous art and cultural publications in many languages and her work is in worldwide private and public collections. Ashery is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Drama Department of Queen Mary University London and she is a lecturer at the Art Department in Goldsmiths. Her latest project, Party for Freedom, was developed through workshops for Artsadmin (London, UK), Performance Matters: Trashing Performance (Suffolk, UK), Teak Theatre Academy (Helsinki, Finland), Le Transpalette Centre d'Art Contemporain (Bourges, France) and Metal (Southend on Sea, UK).