A RESTORATION
A two-channel video installation responding to the collections of the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean Museums, in Oxford.
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-90-1735
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- March
- Year of production
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- A RESTORATION (2016) is a two-channel video installation commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society. In the work, Elizabeth Price responds to the collections of the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean Museums, both in Oxford, exploring how forms of digital assembly can produce temporal and categorical disturbance through heterogenous image groups, with distinct connections to contemporaneity and its crises, including colonialism’s legacy. Price bases her work on the albums of archaeologist Arthur Evans, and his pioneering use of photo-collaging techniques. In this way, Price interrogates the art historical origins of digital post-production, creating an intermedial work that expands the concept of the ‘album’ by also incorporating sound and writing.
Price developed A RESTORATION (2016) through extensive archival research at Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ashmolean Museum, which encompassed both the content of their collections and their cataloguing methods. In addition, the creation of A RESTORATION (2016) was supported by site visits (including a visit to Knossos, Crete); interviews with expert curators, conservationists and animators; a secondary literature review; and in-studio experiments with various pieces of software and techniques for scanning, modelling, producing synthetic voice sounds, video synchronisation, and CG animation. Through her research and the first-ever comprehensive digitisation of Arthur Evans’ albums, Price revealed how objects categorised as documentary may not always be adequately documented themselves. As a result, their cultural significance often remains unexplored. In the case of Evans’ albums, this significance relates not only to their creator’s colonial presumptions and fabulations, but also to the way in which the documents have been altered over the years. Such changes leave gaps in knowledge which highlight both the limits and the creative possibilities of an experience with no adequate record.
Following its first exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in2016, the work was subsequently shown in Australia, US, New Zealand, Ireland, and theUK.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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