Oreet Ashery

When I looked at mourning as a possible space for agency or at least as a form or an aesthetic I was thinking about the relationship between proximity and distance. The Internet can allow forms of mourning that aren't always possible in real life, especially for minority groups, but it also exploits it. It is, for me, one of the questions of our time: how do we navigate the co-option of the Internet and social media? 'Oreet Ashery: how we die is how we live only more so' brings together written responses to Oreet Ashery's award-winning film work Revisiting Genesis (2016). This work, originally conceived as a web series, presents the fictional story of the dying artist Genesis alongside conversations with artists who have real life-limiting conditions. The publication includes writing by Rizvana Bradley, T. J. Demos, Mason Leaver-Yap, Imani Robinson, and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz along with the scripts for Revisiting Genesis and Dying under Your Eyes (2019) and an interview of Ashery by George Vasey. Ashery's work explores queer and outsider death and dying, care, politics of the digital afterlife and posthumous service technologies as well as feminist reincarnation, sociopolitical loss, and artistic withdrawal.