This screening includes a post-screening Q&A between artist Oreet Ashery and Sarah Perks, our Artistic Director of Visual Art.
Film details
Revisiting Genesis (2016) takes the form of a web-series in twelve episodes. Written and directed by Oreet Ashery. Revisiting Genesis explores the philosophical, socio-political, practical and emotional implications of the processes surrounding withdrawal, digital afterlives and legacy, dying, social networks and reincarnations of women artists.
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.
Developed in consultation with Medical and Death Online experts, 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.
Oreet Ashery is a UK based interdisciplinary artist whose politically charged and socially engaged practice includes exhibitions, performances, videos and writings, in an international context, that explore issues of gender materiality, potential communities and biopolitics.
Revisiting Genesis is commissioned by the Stanley Picker Fellowships, 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.
