Slow Dans by Elizabeth Price @ Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow

This month sees the Scottish premiere of SLOW DANS, one of the most ambitious installations to date by Turner Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price. 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).

SLOW DANS is 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 compact 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.

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 – currently in Glasgow at The Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow until 16 April 2023.

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).

The physical layout of the installation expands on the subjects and themes of the video-cycle. The projectors are oriented vertically, standing in, at various points, for mine shafts, inkwells, the human throat, and the format of a book page. They sit at two different heights, representing spaces below and above ground, the relation between a hard drive and a desktop computer, the interconnections of our geological past and technological present, and explorations of social and economic hierarchies of labour.

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. They also gesture to what remains, mine shafts still descending to a vast network of tunnels.

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 phallic symbolism of the tie also recalls the ink pen nib, another representation of those who traditionally held the power to write our history.

The visual imagery of THE TEACHERS is drawn from photography of women’s formal wear featured in UK fashion magazines between 1969 and 1995. The dresses are elaborate, the models’ poses never natural. They use exaggerated gestures to demonstrate the distinctive features of the clothes. Removed from the context of the fashion magazine, these disembodied gestures acquire different expressive powers.