Elizabeth Price wins the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award 2013

Elizabeth Price is the winner of the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award 2013 with the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art).

Now in its fifth year, the prestigious prize was presented in 2013 by Mark Wallinger in a ceremony at the Dairy Art Centre in London on attended by artists, curators, collectors and other art world VIPs. Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price is an artist who uses images, text and music to explore archives and collections. While her work is informed by mainstream cinema and experimental film, it is mostly concerned with the medium of digital video and its comparative ubiquity in today’s culture. Through judicious editing the artist composes the material into narratives, which shift between different archives and collections seeking to expose the links between materials that have very different histories.

Elizabeth’s commission will explore the archives and collections of the Ashmolean Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum (which cares for Oxford’s holdings of anthropology and world archaeology), looking particularly at photographs of artefacts and documents used historically by curators, anthropologists and archaeologists working in the field, while simultaneously engaging with the social and psychological implications of digital technologies. The commission, comprising a single-screen video, will present and narrate artefacts from the Ashmolean’s collection, with a focus on the female figure and the photographic and archival means of disclosing this figure over time.