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Oreet Ashery: Animal with a Language at waterside contemporary

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Time 13:00
Date 18/09/14
Price Free

Mayakovsky, degraded actions and material forms, the political unconscious, body languages of exile and the salvage of utopian moments - in interaction.

Animal with a Language engages with ‘rage against reason’, an attempt to foreground agency against a backdrop of prevailing flatline economies.

Within a flesh toned environment, hypnotic sound, text, videos and assemblages, Ashery’s objects and actors acquire meaning through associative transmission and direct expression. The gallery space becomes a codified system for the flow of subconscious excess, exhaustive languages of protest, grassroots actions and questionable cultural appropriations.

Reactivating The Clean and The Unclean, the protagonists of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s revolutionary 1921 play Mystery-Bouffe, Ashery collaboratively produced a collection of ponchos and headgear. These humble forms of dress made from ubiquitous cleaning materials - dish cloths, wipes, dusters, cellulose sponges, copper scouring pads, cable ties, tea towels, coffee cups, potato prints, monster rolls, marigold gloves, bin liners, coloured duck tape – are the uniforms of speculative purists and partisans, exploited labourers and heroes. Adorned with this couture collection, the cast expose themselves to the inevitable risk of becoming objectified fashion icons.

Another of Ashery’s characters is the Paranormal Pig, drawn from her recent project Party for Freedom. Here, the pig appears as a nonchalant woman ready for roasting. In another incarnation, the pig becomes an elevated sculptural figure and elsewhere reproduced as a snout-print, a ready logotype.

Within the troubling global condition of The Un/Clean, Ashery interrogates the paradoxical coexistence of revolt and desire towards the unclean and animalistic, the annihilation of the self and others.

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