Elizabeth Price is known for her moving image works made specifically for gallery environments. These draw on archives and museum collections and often include scrolling texts and computerised voice-overs set against musical backgrounds. In 2012 Price won the Turner Prize for her solo exhibition HERE at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. In 2014, she won the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award to create a commission for The Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums, Oxford.

A RESTORATION, 2016, is the result of this commission. It is a 15-minute, two channel video installation drawing on the archives of The Ashmolean’s second Keeper, Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941), an archaeologist responsible for excavating the Minoan palace complex at Knossos on the island of Crete. Re-animating his collection of drawings, plans, photographs and artefacts, and combining these with digitised photographs of objects from these museums’ collections, Price creates an evolving narrative that imagines how relics from a distant past might be given new life as digital images in the virtual domain of a computer’s storage system. To her edited compilation of images, she adds sounds and words that bring to a dramatic climax this latest process of compilation, cataloguing and arrangement that she conceives as being undertaken by a female ‘chorus’ of museum administrators. She leaves viewers with a renewed sense of the impossibility of ever truly ‘restoring’ the past, reminding us of the paradox that museum professionals and scholars inevitably distort history even as they seek to preserve it.

Elizabeth Price (b. 1966) has exhibited her work in solo presentations including Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Stedelijk, Amsterdam; The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Hayward Gallery, London; Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York; Berlin Natural History Museum, and Chicago Institute of Art. She is working on exhibitions for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2018; Nottingham Contemporary and the Whitworth, Manchester 2019, and The Void, Derry, in 2020. Elizabeth Price is represented by Grimm Gallery, Brussels, Amsterdam and New York.

Adam Art Gallery thanks EP Studio for their assistance in the realisation of Elizabeth Price’s installation.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Marie Shannon: Rooms found only in the home.