British Art Show - Elizabeth Price

Elizabeth Price User Group Disco

Elizabeth Price | User Group Disco, 2009

High definition video, colour, sound | Duration: 15 minutes | Courtesy the artist and MOT International London

Elizabeth Price was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1966 and grew up in Luton Bedfordshire. In 2004 Price won the Jerwood Artists Platform Prize. Between 2004-6 she was Research Fellow in Fine Art at London Metropolitan University and in 2007 was awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University.

User Group Disco is the second video in Elizabeth Price’s series New, Ruined Institute. Each episode takes place in a different room within a fictional institution, this time inside a museum’s Hall of Sculptures. Kitsch porcelain dolls, ebony records and disco balls rotate to the music of Aha, while text borrowed from corporate power-point presentations and literary and philosophical tracts materialises on screen.

There is just littered debris: defunct, damaged, unidentifiable things. There are also no people here - no apparent human action, and no visible architecture. The only things visible are the objects themselves - a debris comprised of mundane and ubiquitous objects, utensils and ornaments. And these things drift in a black void.

What ensues during the course of the video, is a series of reveries and hallucinations concerning these objects.

Price presents us with strange and miscellaneous objects to classify. ‘I don’t want my work to be seen as institutional critique, but perhaps one of its descendents. I’m interested in working with it not as a failed project but as an unfulfilled narrative.’

I love this idea of an unfulfilled narrative and keeping the viewing wanting to see more. The darkness wirthin this video captured my imagination and the close ups of these objects are just like the dream like fantasy I am trying to create within my own short films.