Elizabeth Price’s video installation The Woolworths Choir of 1979 has won the Turner Prize 2012. Price’s film uses archive footage and photographs, combining images of three seemingly disparate elements (photographs of church architecture; clips of the 1960s girl band The Shangri-Las; and archive news footage of a fire that killed 10 people in the central Manchester branch of Woolworths in 1979), digitally montaged to poetic and dissonant effect. The work is currently on display at Tate Britain. You can watch a short clip of the film here.
Price’s work was up against Glasgow-based Luke Fowler’s film All Divided Selves 2011, an exploration of seminal Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing (1927–1989). This film also uses archive footage and presents the viewer with a collage of edited archival material, through which the viewer becomes an unintended witness to some of Laing’s psychiatric sessions.
