Arts and Design

Elizabeth Price: A Long Memory review – traumatic visions that are hard to forget


A common fix for those struggling with sluggish internet use is to clear the cache. A quick trip into settings and the browser forgets all your logins, your recently viewed websites and Google searches for things like “Donald Trump impeachment odds”, “best sustainable swimsuits” and “how do I clear the cache?” But what if we didn’t clear the cache? What if – instead – we kept returning to the webpages we viewed for one minute, mining them for information and viewing them as avenues of exploration?

That is what Elizabeth Price does in A Long Memory at the Whitworth, the Turner prize winner’s most extensive exhibition to date. The only difference is that this cache is not full of cat memes but rather decades of research delving into the hierarchies of labour, the formation of memories and the development of social history. It is long in both its observation of time (looking to the future while reflecting on events in the 1970s) and in the depth of its investigation. Yet for something so multi-layered, A Long Memory is surprisingly succinct.

Elizabeth Price, KOHL, 2018



Elizabeth Price, KOHL, 2018. Photograph: Courtesy of/copyright the artist

Price is known for her rollicking multi-screen video projections that blend thumping bass with robotic narrators, bold text and a cascade of images. But this show opens quietly with a new series of photographs, sculptural prints and the archive of coal mine photographer Albert Walker, who informed Price’s video work KOHL. GETT REDY is a collection of black and white photographs shot using a pinhole camera and various stencils. Greeted by a series of human tongues on the left and an assortment of glassware on the right, we consider how we form and hold memories. A glass is raised high to mark marriages, graduations, birthdays and any sort of momentous occasion. When we lift that glass to our mouths, thousands of taste buds savour and memorise our favourite flavours. Price’s reintroduction of a more hands-on type of creating is her own refusal to lose knowledge after 15 years tapping away at a computer.

Remembering is not always a private activity; it is the precarious ground on which relationships are built, society is maintained and hierarchies are enshrined. Price is well aware of this, creating a fictional past, parallel present and imagined future for her first video trilogy, SLOW DANS. Positioned at three heights, the videos (KOHL, FELT TIP and THE TEACHERS) bleed into one another, playing at intervals so the alternative realities have to be experienced communally. Together, we watch longstanding inequalities topple; coal mines begin to speak again as academics commit to elective muteness, and oppressed female administrative staff subvert language and the stereotypical office tie.

Elizabeth Price, FELT TIP, 2018



Elizabeth Price, FELT TIP, 2018. Photograph: Courtesy of/copyright the artist

Price is an expert in memorial – not in the formal sculpture making, plaque placing or date taking typical in societal remembering – but in encapsulating what she terms “qualities of experience”. THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 is the best example of this. The 18-minute projection – showing for the first time in Manchester – reflects on the fatal fire that killed 10 people in the city 40 years ago. It includes floorplans, facts and experts, but it is the “twist of the wrist” that turns my blood cold. Hands gesture as onlookers explain what they saw, lift to faces to contain devastation, wave from windows behind billows of smoke. The flick of the fingers over and over is the lick of a flame, incessant in destruction. We don’t know the victims’ names, but for a moment we are frozen in time, overwhelmed by the magnitude of their trauma.

Price might lead us to the memorial, but she lets us do the mourning, theorising and memorising ourselves. Later, my own cache contains the Google search “Woolworths fire Manchester” and “Orgreave colliery”.

Elizabeth Price: A Long Memory is at the Whitworth, Manchester, until 1 March.



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