Oreet Ashery: Staying: Dream, Bin, Soft Stud and Other Stories

From January 2010, London’s Artangel will be showing a new interaction project.  The exhibition titled, “Staying: Dream, Bin, Soft Stud and Other Stories” was created by Oreet Ashery and 12 lesbian asylum seekers who escaped countries such as Nigeria and Barbados due to discrimination against their sexual identities.

Within the project, a character takes her life stories and turns them into ideas such as rooms of a house, a dream and a gun that transforms into a camera. These forms of presentation were inspired by Ashery’s collection of discussions, doodles and interviews taken from emotional workshops with the other 12 women involved in Staying: Dream, Bin, Soft Stud and Other Stories.

Ashery’s contribution to Artangel was built upon complex work with the asylum seekers, focusing on the long procedures which requires gay asylum seekers to prove their sexual orientation and lifestyle.  As a result of studying these processes, Ashery created fictional characters that became symbols of the women involved. For example, the rooms of House represent diffferent aspects of a participant’s life effectively working as a theatrical self-portrait.  Bin also symbolises social structure and soft studs are used to play on the idea of a ‘butch’ woman.

The exhibition will be showing at Artangel from 20 January 2010 and you can learn more about the project itself at http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/staying

Why Roger Hiorns Should Have Won The Turner Prize

Although the work of Richard Wright was admirable, my vote was definitely with Roger Hiorns to win the Turner Prize.

If I were to name one outstanding work from any artist nominated for the Turner Prize, Seizure is one that first comes to mind.  Consisting of a council flat covered in blue copper sulphate crystals, Hiorns became the creator of nothing less than a striking environment.

Through Seizure and Hiorns’ exhibition at the Tate Britain this year, I could see no other artist as innovative as him.  Upon the entrance to his exhibition, the spectator is met with a sizeable floor piece of an atomised jet plane. At first when I saw his exhibition, I wasn’t overly blown away.  However, that changed when I came to learn the purpose of his art.

Hiorns bases his creations on the human illusion that everything lasts forever. To challenge this misperception of the world, he exposes materials to processes that demonstrate the destruction and erosion of nature, eventually reducing them to dust.

In order to create the atomised jet plane, Hiorns had the metal completely melted and turned into dust, leaving the floor of the Tate Britain covered in an array of black, grey and silver particles.  A heavy industrial object in which humans depend on, believing planes to always exist, is cremated just as the human body can be after death.

Where Wright displayed a talent for producing beautiful wall paintings, Hiorns re-interprets beauty throughout his works in a more realistic fashion.  In my opinion, Seizure was the most dazzling and innovative piece contributed by any of the four nominees, and this is why Hiorns should have been awarded with 2009’s Turner Prize.

The re-opening of Seizure is now being shown until Jan 3 2010 at Artangel, Harper Road