This January sees the opening of the Scottish premiere of SLOW DANS, one of the most ambitious installations to date by Turner Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price, exploring class, patriarchy and labour. Presented by Glasgow Life, the charity that delivers culture and sport in Glasgow, the work will be shown in the prestigious main space at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA).
Elizabeth Price is an internationally renowned artist with work in collections around the world. She has had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, London, UK; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Chicago Institute of Art, USA; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; The Baltic, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK; and another exhibition -UNDERFOOT – that is currently in The Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow until 16th April 2023.
SLOW DANSis a cycle of three 10 screen videos – KOHL, FELT TIP and THE TEACHERS. These three works present a fictional past, parallel present and imagined future, interweaving narratives that explore social and sexual histories and our changing relationship with the material and the digital. Following the presentation at GoMA FELT TIP will enter the Glasgow Museums’ collection.
KOHL features the archive of former miner Albert Walker, who photographed UK coal mine architecture between 1970 and 1990. Walker’s images are presented upside down and in negative, representing the erasure of these industrial landmarks from our landscape.
In FELT TIP, Price uses a collection of men’s neckties to explore the changing demographics of the office workforce in the period 1970–90. The ties connect this social change to interrelated histories of writing, weaving and data storage.
The visual imagery of THE TEACHERS is drawn from photography of women’s formal wear featured in UK fashion magazines between 1969 and 1995 showing elaborate designs and models’ unnatural poses. They use exaggerated gestures to demonstrate the distinctive features of the clothes that, when removed from the context of the fashion magazine, take on different meanings.
SLOW DANS is a collaboration between Artangel, Film and Video Umbrella, Nottingham Contemporary, the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Glasgow Life Museums with previous iterations of the trilogy shown in Manchester (2019) and London (2020).
https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/venues/gallery-of-modern-art-goma/exhibitions-at-goma
Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, G1 3AH
27th January – 14th May 2023 Free admission
Monday – Thursday & Saturday 10am – 5pm, Friday & Sunday 11am – 5pm
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 