Don’t Look at Me!

Nicole Ahland, Oreet Ashery

Oreet Ashery’s work explores the relationships between politics of representation and minorities’ discourses. After Duchamp is a self-portrait based on Man Ray’s photograph titled Tonsure de Marcel Duchamp (c. 1920). After Duchamp portrays Ashery as a naked figure of ambiguous gender with a shaved Star of David alongside African hair patterns. The haircut was designed by Ashery and made by the artist Faisal Abdu'allah. Her gender, émigré status and Jewish ethnicity became a living sculpture as Ashery walked the streets of London. Nicole Ahland also examines the classics of photography. She arranges reproductions from her collection in all kinds of spaces. This setting permits new forms of the photographic and the observing gaze. In light of the huge quantity of images flooding the world, Ahland takes up the challenge of finding the view of the other, and thus the other itself, in the photographic gaze – and she challenges viewers to allow themselves to be approached by the face of the other and the alien.