From the original Festival website:

Oreet Ashery has been working with hair as a physical and a cultural material over many years.  Hairoism takes Eleanor Antin’s The King (1972) as a departure point.

The King is a silent, 52-minute, black and white film where Antin slowly applies hair to her face to become her male alter ego. Significantly, Antin has referred to The King as her political self.

Two assistants will apply hair kindly donated from the audience to Ashery’s head and face to imitate four male public figures. The first figure has the least hair and the last has the most, allowing Ashery to become hairier as the piece progresses. After the fourth figure’s hair pattern has been applied, the assistants will continue to glue hair from the audience to Ashery’s face and body with the goal of covering it entirely. The final effect is something akin to an ape or a werewolf.

The hair patterns of the following men will be recreated: Moshe Dayan, the general of the Israel Defence Forces during the 1950s and a national symbol of the Israeli military; Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzouk, a senior member of the Palestinian organisation Hamas who, since 1997, has served as the Deputy Chairman of Hamas Political Bureau; Avigdor Lieberman, the current Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs  and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel who believes that Israel’s citizens should sign a loyalty oath or lose their right to vote and who, in November 2006, called for those Arab members of the Knesset (Israeli legislature assembly) that met with Hamas be tried for treason; Yassar Arafat/Ringo Starr (the internet is currently flooded with pictures of Ringo Starr next to Yasar Arafat), highlighting their apparent outward similarities including hair styles.

Oreet Ashery is a London based, interdisciplinary visual artist. Ashery’s practice engages with socio-political paradigms and interests in notions of subjectivity and authenticity. She will frequently produce work as a male character. These have included: an orthodox Jewish man, an Arab man, a black man, a Norwegian postman, a large farmer and most recently a false messiah. Ashery had published three books in 2009; The Novel of Nonel  andVovel, a joint graphic novel and an expanded project with the artist Larissa Sansour (Charta), Dancing with Men; interactive performances, interactions and other artworks (Live Art Development Agency), and Staying; Dream, Bin, Soft Stud and Other Stories (Artangel).  Ashery is an AHRC fellow in the drama department at Queen Mary University.

Supported by the ACE and AHRC.

updates to biography in 2020:  
Oreet Ashery won the prestigious Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis, looking at the emergent field of death, dying and the digital, revisitinggenesis.net.  Ashery published her book How We Die Is How We Live Only More So, Mousse Publishing, 2019, including new writing by T.J Demos, Rizvana Bradley, Mason Leaver-Yap, Imani Robinson, George Vasey and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz. Expanding this field of enquiry, Ashery’s film Dying Under Your Eyes, 2019, captures moments of intimate surveillance and assembles a collage of daily experiences and rituals, both real and imaginary, leading up to the sudden death of her father in 2018. It was commissioned by Wellcome Collection as part of the long-duration exhibition Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence & Oreet Ashery, May 2019 – January 2020. Full list of projects and academic work at:

oreetashery.net