Elizabeth Price: Filmscreening und Workshop

Screening, Lecture and Workshop with Elizabeth Price

London based visual artist and Turner Prize winner in 2012, Elizabeth Price will present two of her digital video works, THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 (18 min, 2012) as well as the two screen HD video installation K (7 min, 2015) and talk about her artistic practice. She will also hold a workshop based on the song as a collective and political artistic expression. A program hosted jointly by the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) and the University of Cologne (Institute for Art and Art Theory / Labor für Kunst und Forschung).

Screening and Lecture
July 7, 2016 7 PM
Kunsthochschule für Medien (KHM), Aula
Filzengraben 2/2A, 50676 Köln

Workshop with Elizabeth Price
July 8, 2016 11 AM – 1 PM
University of Cologne
Institut für Kunst und Kunsttheorie / Labor für Kunst und Forschung
Dürener Str. 89, City Passagen, 1. Etage 50931 Köln

The workshop is limited to 15 people total.

For registration please send an email to: info-lfkf@uni-koeln.de (University) or lilian.haberer@khm.de (KHM).

Elizabeth Price (born 1966, Bradford) is a visual artist based in London. In her digital video and installation works Price deals with the notion of social and historical contexts. By assembling heterogeneous voices through sound, text and digital images she creates a highly intense psychological narration. Whether Price focuses on a modernist house and its art collection (AT THE HOUSE OF MR. X, 2007), a book featuring British Systems Group or an archive showing glass plate negatives of the sun (SUNLIGHT, 2013): the artist deals with factual knowledge, but also with the sensuality of its surfaces and appropriates musical structures, forms and rhythms. By reflecting the visual language of communication systems, her artistic practice resists an assimilation with these contexts and creates a porous space of action with the audience.

THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 (2012), for which the artist won the Turner Price in 2012, connects three episodes through a human gesture and the double meaning of choir/quire: art historical reproductions of Gothic architecture and 3D animations, found footage of singers and dancers which form a human choir and different human voices who report the disastrous fire at a department store in Manchester. Price is taking up the “We know” as one convention of historical texts and focuses on the shifting identities of the addressed collective groups.
K (2015) extends the concerns of polyphony and lament established in THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979. In this, a two channel installation (one screen presented horizontally the other, vertically) the screens are used to create a complex topography. At the top of the vertical screen a crude, flickering animation of the sun is presented, created from thousands of glass plate photographs made of the sun on a daily basis from the 1870s to the 1950s. This sun ‘illuminates’ a computer generated digital animation of the mechanical production and packaging of hosiery, which is located on the horizontal screen. Images of dancers migrate between the two screens, seemingly responding to both the motion of the sun, and the machinery. The narration claims to speak on the dancers behalf, and tells a tale of mourning, commerce and labour, which bind all of the visual elements together.

Elizabeth Price’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions, most recently at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin) and at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Turku Art Museum, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Julia Stoschek Collection (Dusseldorf), Musée d’art Contemporain (Montreal), Tate Britain (London), New Museum (New York), The Baltic (Newcastle).
Her work has been also included in group shows and screenings, such as space, New Media Gallery (Vancouver), Museum ON/OFF, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Secret Surface Immersive Frames, Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana Mexico (Mexico City), IndieMovingImage Programme, Fundacao Gulbenkian (Lissabon), The Surface of the World, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manille), The Narrators, Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool), Light Reading, Arnolfini (Bristol), Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Cairo Tronica, ICA (London), Images Festival Toronto Selected, Whitechapel Gallery (London).

Price curated an exhibition IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY at the Whitworth Gallery (Manchester). Over the past few years Price has taught art on undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, London. She is presently an Associate Professor of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University and Professor of Film and Photography at Kingston University.