Stanley Picker Gallery

Oreet Ashery’s Revisiting Genesis is a major online commission taking the form of a web-series in twelve episodes. Commissioned through the Stanley Picker Fellowships, the project premiered at Stanley Picker Gallery in Spring 2016 and led to Ashery winning the Jarman Award in 2017. The work is being presented at The Wellcome Trust in 2019 as part of Jo Spence & Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies. 

Written and directed by the artist, Revisiting Genesis explores the philosophical, sociopolitical, practical and emotional implications of the processes surrounding death and withdrawal, digital afterlives, outsider communities, social networks and reincarnations of women artists. Developed in consultation with Medical and Death Online experts, including researchers at Kingston University, and produced with a range of artistic collaborators, Revisiting Genesis responds to diverse influences spanning from feminist art practice to outsider and minority politics, as well as the emergent online death industry.

Revisiting Genesis follows two nurses, both named Jackie, who assist people actively preparing for death to create biographical slideshows serving as their posthumous digital legacy. The slideshows become a tool for reflection on cultural and social loss, friendships and memory as identity. When a group of friends request this treatment for Genesis – an artist who is dying symbolically and otherwise – Nurse Jackie attempts to activate Genesis’ memory through the making of her slideshow, which draws from elements of Ashery’s own autobiography and explores the disappearance of social and educational structures under contemporary neoliberalism. Jackie concludes that it might not be Genesis who is vanishing, but the structures she had relied on. Presented in parallel with Genesis’ story, the twelve episodes are intercut with improvised interviews between individuals with life-limiting conditions and Nurse Jackie, played here by a practising GP.

Revisiting Genesis was commissioned by the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University and supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Tyneside Cinema, Goldsmiths University of London and waterside contemporary.

Oreet Ashery is a UK based interdisciplinary visual artist born in Israel, whose personally and politically charged exhibitions, performances, videos and writings are highly regarded internationally. Ashery works on public, community, educational and participatory projects that are both politically and socially engaged, and is particularly interested in gender, race and religion, ethnicity and identity. Ashery was appointed Stanley Picker Fellow in 2014 and won the Jarman Award in 2017.

Enjoy our online content? Please complete a survey here.

Streetscape is an audio-visual collaboration between filmmaker Rachel Davies and designer Fabien Cappello to accompany Cappello’s Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition at the Gallery from 23 April – 13 June 2015.

Streetscape  seeks to explore how public furniture inhabits and relates to its surroundings. Taking into consideration the provenance, uses and contexts of existing London street furniture, Cappello has created a series of prototypes that are currently on exhibition in the Stanley Picker Gallery and in use around Kingston town centre.

In a series of long takes, filmmaker Rachel Davies creates a narrative that take a subtly hyper-real approach that places Cappello’s public furniture prototypes in an urban context that could be read as one of many towns around Britain. The soundtrack moves in and out of focus to highlight birdsong, a bike bell and a rollerblader amongst the steady hum of traffic.

The Mobile Landscape is a slideshow with a documentary-style narrative that describes Ferguson’s journeys around the highways of England. In search of a site for a public art project, the artist takes the viewer along rural stretches of the motorway to inspect a series of roadside advertising hoardings in South East England. They are the type mounted on obsolete transport infrastructure and which are strategically positioned on agricultural land. As the hoardings are surveyed for their potential, there emerges a political history of the view from the road: of a countryside sculpted by the comings and goings of capital; of rural aspirations and anxieties; of clandestine livelihoods sustained by proximity to the road.

Nick Ferguson is a London-based artist and writer, whose research and practice span art, urbanism and political philosophy. His practice examines the political histories of built environments – rural, urban and maritime. Through fieldwork, modelling, building, talking and writing, it engages with the way that territory is acquired, organised and used. There is a concern with landscape, the picturesque (especially as played out in suburbia), and the relationship between vision and possession.

Ferguson’s writing focuses on the role that contemporary art has played in the construction of the built environment more generally: in the aspiration for a more democratic distribution of places through aesthetic forms and social events; in the expectation from art’s state, private and corporate investors of return; in art’s presentation of local histories for scrutiny and interpretation in the public domain. He has recently completed a practice based PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.