Elizabeth Price: The Artist and the Museum

The talk will focus on the ambitious work produced (A RESTORATION) and the challenging phases it went through. From a museum perspective it will focus on the selection and commission of the artist as well as unveiling Price’s engagement with the archives and collections of anthropology and archaeology of the Ashmolean Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum. The event should map all elements of the commission to convey a sense of what it is to create a work of the sort; engaging with the museum’s collections on one side while dealing with the social and psychological implications of digital technologies on the other. Speakers will include Elizabeth Price, Alison Roberts, Paul Collins, Chris Morton, Harry Pythian Adams. 

The event is open to museum professionals but particularly suited for work people working on commissions (curators, project managers, registrars); dealing with archaeological, anthropological, social collections (scholars, researchers, specialists); artists that might be commissioned a work within a museum context as well as art historians, critics and managers.

11.45-12.30 - Registration and light lunch. Short introduction to the day and the annual award by Ilaria Puri Purini (CAS)

12.30-13.00 - Viewing of the Elizabeth Price installation (A RESTORATION)

13.00-15.00 - Panel discussion with Elizabeth Price, Alison Roberts and/or Paul Collins, Chris Morton, Harry Pythian Adams moderated by Ilaria Puri Purini 

15.00-15.15 - Coffee and End Notes

       

Facilitators

Elizabeth Price is a Turner Prize winner. She is an artist who uses images, text and music to explore archives and collections. While her work is informed by mainstream cinema and experimental film, it is mostly concerned with the medium of digital video and its comparative ubiquity in today’s culture. Through judicious editing Price composes the material into narratives which shift between different archives and collections seeking to expose the links between materials that have very different histories. Born in Bradford in 1966, Elizabeth Price lives and works in London. She was educated at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford and the Royal College of Art, London, and she gained a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds in 1999. She has exhibited in group exhibitions across the globe, and has had solo exhibitions at Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, and the British Film Institute, London; the New Museum, New York; and the Musee d’art Contemporain, Montreal. In 2012 she was the winner of the Turner Prize with her work, THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979, described by veteran art critic Richard Dorment in the Telegraph as, ’20 of the most exhilarating minutes I’ve ever spent in an art gallery.’

Dr. Ilaria Puri Purini is Programmes Manager at the Contemporary Art Society, London. A curator and art historian she has worked on the exhibitions ‘Futurismo 100!’, ‘Futurismo: Avanguardie a Confronto’ at the Museum of Art of Rovereto (MART) and the Scuderie del Quirinale. She has been research assistant at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate Modern. Recent articles have appeared in Dance Research Journal and Photography and Culture. 

Dr Paul Collins in the Jaleh Hearn Curator for Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum. He has worked previously as a curator in the Middle East Department of the British Museum and the Ancient Near Eastern Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Dr Chris Morton is Curator of Photograph and Manuscript Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Lecturer in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Alison Roberts is Assistant Keeper for European and Early Prehistoric Collections at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. She is also responsible for the Department of Antiquities archives, including the papers of Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941). Alison was the lead curator for Elizabeth Price's work.

Harry Pythian-Adams is Executive Project Officer at the Ashmolean. He was the project manager for the Elizabeth Price Project.