Elizabeth Price, winner of the 2012 Turner Prize and one of the most innovative and exciting British artists working today, displayed her Contemporary Art Society Award winning work at the Ashmolean Museum 18 March – 15 May 2016.
A RESTORATION is a newly commissioned work in response to the collections and archives of the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums.
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.
This display was produced in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum and The Ruskin School of Art.
