Oreet Ashery has won the 2017 Film London Jarman Award, it was announced this evening at a special event at London’s Curzon Soho. Oreet Ashery works across moving image and performance. Her risky, fearless and often satirical work breaks taboos and challenges audiences.
Oreet Ashery Party for Freedom, video still, Artangel commission 2013
In Party for Freedom, commissioned by Artangel, Oreet combines moving image with live performance and music in a work that questions both the traditions of hippy liberalism and the rise of far right popularism. In the web-series Revisiting Genesis, Ashery tackles modern attitudes to death. The work combines real life subjects and fictional characters in a narrative that questions the modern death industry and its relationship to technology – from digital wills that organise online assets to a posthumous video email service. Her film and performance works are constantly experimenting, often collaborative, and feature original music and costumes. She has shown work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Freud Museum, Whitstable Biennale, ICA and the Royal Opera House.
Oreet Ashery was born and grew up in Jerusalem and now lives in London. She has won numerous awards and her work is held in a number of public and private collections including the Tate and the Brooklyn Museum. Her most recent touring work Passing Through Metal is a performance piece that combines knitting and death metal. Audiences are invited to pass through the sound of metallic rain produced by eighty metal knitting needles, each attached to a pick-up microphone, and occasionally interrupted by a sludge metal band.
Oreet Ashery receives £10,000 prize money, as well as a commission for Channel 4’s Random Acts strand.
The 2017 Film London Jarman Award was presented by Isaac Julien. Julien is an acclaimed filmmaker and artist. In 2008 he made a film, Derek, about Derek Jarman’s life starring Tilda Swinton.
Oreet Ashery was chosen from a distinguished shortlist of artists also featuring Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Adham Faramawy, Melanie Manchot, Charlotte Prodger and Marianna Simnett. All six artists will receive a film commission for Channel 4’s short-form arts strand Random Acts.
In addition to the Jarman Award, sound designer Chu-Li Shewring received the Jules Wright Prize of £5,000 for Female Creative Technician. Named after the late founder of The Wapping Project, a successful theatre director, curator and long-time champion of women in the arts, the prize seeks to recognise, reward and highlight female creative technicians who have made a significant contribution to artists’ films. Chu-Li Shewring has worked with artists such as Steve McQueen, Frances Scott and Ben Rivers and was praised for her exquisite ‘invisible’ art and craft of layering emotions, mood and underscoring actions in artists’ films.
Adrian Wootton OBE, Chief Executive of Film London and the British Film Commission said:
“Oreet Ashery is a fitting winner for the tenth Film London Jarman Award as her mercurial, ever-evolving work is nigh-on impossible to pigeonhole. She has spent her entire career pushing the boundaries of moving image as an art form, and it’s this questing restlessness of spirit that we set out to champion when the Award was first established. I’d like to congratulate Oreet and the five other nominees, and also offer my sincere thanks to our generous supporters Arts Council England and our sponsors the Genesis Cinema, along with Channel 4, the FLAMIN team, our jury and all the artists, supporters and partners who have helped sustain the Jarman Award over the last ten exciting years.”
flamin.filmlondon.org.uk/jarman_home/jarman-2017
The Jarman Award, established in 2008, celebrates the diversity and creativity of artists working in film today and provides them with an opportunity to reach a wider audience by creating new work for Channel 4’s Random Acts. Nominated by experts across the UK contemporary film and arts sectors, the Jury who selected this year’s shortlist were: Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, Whitechapel Gallery; Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator, International Art (Film), Tate Modern and Film London Board Member; Catherine Bray, Editor, Random Acts, Channel 4; Shona Illingworth, Artist; Peter Taylor, Director, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and Tyrone Walker-Hebborn, Director, Genesis Cinema.
Previous winners include – Luke Fowler (2008), Lindsay Seers (2009), Emily Wardill (2010), Anya Kirschner & David Panos (2011), James Richards (2012), John Smith (2013), Ursula Mayer (2014) Seamus Harahan (2015) and Heather Phillipson (2016).
About Oreet Ashery
Oreet Ashery is an interdisciplinary visual artist with an eclectic practice spanning photography, moving image, mass-produced and unique artefacts, text, music, workshops and performance. Ashery’s work confronts ideological, social and gender constructions. Her 12 part web series Revisiting Genesis mixes fictional dialogue with real life interviews. The work explores issues around identity, dying in the digital age and the legacy we leave in the afterlife. Ashery’s recent large scale projects include: Passing Through Metal, a sonic performance commissioned by LPS, Malmo, 2017; The World is Flooding, a Tate Modern Turbine Hall performance and Party for Freedom, a moving-image album, concerts and performances commissioned by Artangel, 2013.
About Chu-Li Shewring
Chu-Li Shewring is a filmmaker and sound designer collaborating mainly with artists and independent filmmakers. She is also a visiting sound tutor at UCL and the National Film and Television School. Before this, she worked at the production company Illuminations that specialises in films about the arts, then as a medical videographer at Charing Cross Hospital. Shewring is a graduate of MA in Sound Design at the National Film and Television School. Hunger (2008), by Steve McQueen, was one of her first experiences of working with an artist. Her most recent collaborations are with the artist Frances Scott on her film installation CANWEYE { } (2016), and her archival film Diviner. Shewring has also worked with the artists Ben Rivers, Phil Coy and choreographer Siobhan Davies.
