Elizabeth Price

The fifteen-minute, two-screen digital video installation employs the museums’ photographic and graphic archives. It is a fiction, set to melody and percussion, which is narrated by a ‘chorus’ of museum administrators who are organising the records of Arthur Evans’s excavation of the Cretan city of Knossos. The administrators use Evans’s extraordinary documents and photographs to figuratively reconstruct the Knossos Labyrinth within the museum’s computer server. They then imagine its involuted space as a virtual chamber through which museum objects digitally flow, clatter and cascade.

The Tent extrapolates an eventful fictional narrative from a black-&-white printed booklet and the body of art that it features in its pages. Presenting artworks with reduced economies, the book, a 1972 Arts Council publication entitled Systems, includes drawings, documentation of works, and photographs of the artists in the ‘British Systems group’, along with extended texts written by each of them. The video’s imagery is derived from recording both the object of the book and the images it contains. The videography employs experimental, high contrast exposures that will cause white pages to bleach away almost entirely, and black pages to intensify so that they become suggestive of spaces rather than surfaces; so that the diagrams/images on those pages seem to float in voids.

A fictional past, parallel present and imagined future as her video trilogy bleeds into another as longstanding inequalities topple; coal mines begin to speak again as academics commit to elective muteness, and oppressed female administrative staff subvert language and the stereotypical office tie.

FELT TIP is a science-fiction story that traces a social, sexual and technological history of the workplace. It is introduced by a female narrator, who is later joined by a chorus of three other computer-generated voices. They are the administrators of a large, unidentified institution. They tell of how they are required to store vast amounts of digital information within their own DNA, specifically in their fingertips, which have lost all sensation.

Two-channel HD video with sound and color

London-based artist Elizabeth Price (UK, b. 1966) creates richly layered, moving image works made specifically for gallery settings. Composed of a broad range of imagery sourced from analogue and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics, her works are often accompanied by scrolling text, narrated by a computerized voice and paired with music.

A film by Elizabeth Price

The two-screen video work, SUNLIGHT (2013) has been constructed using thousands of glass-plate slides of the Sun, created between 1875 and 1945, which Price discovered during her on-going residency at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.