Catalogue > At random

Selfish Road (2022) A 30-minute film by artist and filmmaker Oreet Ashery. Journeying through their homeland and recalling autobiographical memories along the way, Ashery observes how both senses of belonging have and continue to fuse with the vertiginous and winding flows of nation-building, infrastructure and land use. Turning a camera onto the contested land in and around Jerusalem, Selfish Road draws upon the genres of science-fiction, stand-up comedy, the family photo album, and the implicit privilege of the slacker road movie. The film reveals a composite portrait of a rapidly changing landscape: roads collapse into sinkholes, diseased cacti line highways, and location-monitoring apps map circuitous routes to flag “high risk” and “prohibited” areas. This episodic reflection of space and place attempts to work through the paradox: How can you own something that is stolen? Selfish Road depicts a contradictory environment of industrial extraction obscured by spiritual wellness practices. With anger, grief, hope, and resistance, it dreams of material ecological visions for indigenous life away from settler occupation and seeks out an ethics in and beyond the beauty of the region. Commissioned by A KW Production Series. Text by Mason Lever-Yap

Oreet Ashery is a visual artist and an experimental film maker whose practice navigates established, institutional and grassroots contexts. The work engages with bodies, community, worldbuilding, autoethnography, Thanatos, gender and technology. Ashery’s practice manifests through distinct multiplatform projects that span video, 2D image-making, performance and assemblage. Characterised by the use of speculative fiction and humour, the work often occupies utopian, discursive and incongruous spaces. Ashery was a Turner Bursary recipient in 2020 (replacing the Turner Prize during the pandemic) and won the prestigious Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis, interfacing documentary and fiction and looking at the emergent field of digital death. In this context Ashery published her book How We Die Is How We Live Only More So, Mousse Publishing, 2019. Ashery is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford