Elizabeth Price Film Programme
27 November – 16 December Kunsthal Charlottenborg is proud to present the Elizabeth Price Film Programme ‘Spatial Fictions’ curated by Nikolaj Phillipsen.
Three films by the Elizabeth Price are shown throughout the opening hours in Kunsthal Charlottenborg Art Cinema: ‘At the House of Mr. X’, ‘User Group Disco’, and ‘The Woolworths Choir of 1979’, for which Elizabeth Price received the prestigious Turner Pize in 2012.
‘Spatial Fictions’ is investigating architecture as not only made by walls and floors but also made by social and political history, institutions, materialism, and commercial fantasies.
At the House of Mr. X (2007)
A guided tour of the home of an anonymous cosmetic business venture and art collector, designed and built in the late 1960s. Only briefly inhabited, the House and its contents remain immaculately preserved.
With the luxurious and exclusive sensibility of cosmetic brands, we are guided through the house and art collection, elegant open spaces, gleaming reflective surfaces, and colored glass.
The tour is directed by an on-screen script, punctuated with percussion and close-harmony vocal arrangements. Its script is collaged from documents relating to the House, art collection, and ventures of the former resident. The resulting combination of administrative, curatorial and commercial languages produces an equivocal identity: as you move through the pristine interiors the tone shifts from deadpan taxonomical description to the solicitation and innuendo of advertising copy.
User Group Disco (2009)
User Group Disco is the second work in an ongoing series, in which each episode unfolds a different room within the notional architecture of a fictional Institutional building.
This video is set in the Hall of Sculptures, only inhabited by defunct, damaged, unidentifiable things. No people – no apparent human action and no visible architecture. The only things visible are the objects themselves – debris comprised of mundane and ubiquitous objects, utensils and ornaments drifting in a black void.
The video consists of a series of daydreams and hallucinations concerning these objects. These dwell upon the Institution that holds them, upon categories of distinction between art objects and social history artefacts and the strange and compulsive desires of consumerism.
THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 (2012)
Comprising of three parts, the video brings together distinct bodies of material into a dissonant assembly; photographs of church architecture, internet clips of pop performances and news footage of a notorious fire in a Woolworth’s furniture department in 1979. The film weaves together existing archives of text, image, and sound to create video installations that drift between social history and fantasy.
Elizabeth Price treats history as something animated and malleable, as dissonant elements are clashed together to convey the experienced trauma as much as the facts of the event.