Elizabeth Price, User Group Disco

Elizabeth Price
User Group Disco, video installation

From November 18, 2022 to February 27, 2023, Elizabeth Price's work User Group Disco is presented at the Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot as part of the 8th edition of the International Video Art Festival, OVNi Folies! which honours contemporary video creation. 

This video is presented as an echo of Ballet mécanique, a masterpiece of the cinematographic avant-garde made in 1924 by the painter Fernand Léger (1881-1955) in collaboration with the American filmmaker Dudley Murphy (1897-1968). Presented in the museum's auditorium for the duration of the exhibition, Ballet mécanique appears to be a source of inspiration for Elizabeth Price, in the same way as the films of Jean Painlevé or the contemporary Swiss artist duo, Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

User Group Disco, made in 2009, is a video by British artist Elizabeth Price, who conceived the work as the second part of an ongoing series entitled New, Ruined Institute. Within this series, each episode takes place in a different room of a fictional institutional building, invented by the artist. Although no object is clearly identified as a work of art on the screen, User Group Disco is set in the 'Sculpture Hall'. Contrary to what its subtitle indicates, in this video sequence there is no sculpture, no visible architecture, nor any human action, but a ballet of utilitarian objects or artefacts, scattered or damaged. 

Through her obvious fascination with the world of objects, Elizabeth Price's work is similar to that of Fernand Léger. In both works, the objects take on an autonomous life, becoming the actors of an enveloping choreographic movement that draws the viewer in with the variations of rhythm in the montage. Like Fernand Léger, Elizabeth Price emphasises the graphic contrasts and formal beauty of objects seen in close-up and fragmented, which she isolates on a black background to disconnect them from their environment and their function. 

Across generations, Ballet mécanique and User Group Disco deploy a common aesthetic of visual collage - and sound in Price's case - that paints a portrait of an era. Indeed, this succession of heterogeneous objects ends up embodying, in the course of the images, the values, hopes and fantasies of an entire society. While Léger depicts the artistic euphoria of the avant-garde between the wars, Elizabeth Price assembles fragments of objects, popular songs from the 1980s and graphic phrases with hard-hitting content to take a chillingly ironic look at the materialism of present-day society. 

Elizabeth Price is a British artist, born in 1966 in Bradford, West Yorkshire. She studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University and at the Royal College of Art in London. D. in Fine Art from Leeds University, she won the Turner Prize in 2012 with her solo video exhibition "HERE" at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead). More about the artist

Her work User Group Disco (2009) will be presented in resonance with Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's film masterpiece Ballet mécanique (1924), which was presented as part of the Léger and Cinema exhibition.

Festival OVNi 2022 - Special Territory course

At the confluence of the artistic and hotel worlds, the OVNi festival was created in Nice in 2015 as an innovative and original platform to promote video art. Every year, at the end of November, OVNi brings together numerous cultural actors from the city of Nice to create an event and give visibility to emerging and established video artists. The work of all these artists is showcased through different routes that include museums, cultural sites and unusual places.

Apart from the usual rich Parcours en Ville in Nice, the 2022 edition is marked by the creation of the Parcours OVNi Territoire, which opens the scope of the festival to other emblematic places in the Alpes-Maritimes region. Along with the Espace de l'Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, the Fernand Léger national Museum in Biot is participating for the first time in the international video art festival. 

Special meetings are organised during the festival, with a specific presentation and screening of Elizabeth Price's work, User Group Disco: 

• Saturday 19 November 2022, at 10:30 am, meeting point on the 1st floor of the museum.
  Special opening weekend: free admission to the museum, between 10 am and 2 pm.
   
• Sunday 4 December, at 10.30 am, meeting point on the 1st floor of the museum. 
  Duration of these meetings: about 1 hour
  To consult the full programme of the OVNi 2022 edition, click here

Elizabeth Price, User Group Disco, 2009 (vidéo HD couleur et son; durée : 15 min). Courtesy : Elizabeth Price, 2023.