Judy Price: Still

Judy Price presents a unique body of work focused on Palestine. Two multi-screen installations and a photographic piece reflect in very different ways on Palestine’s colonial past and the current lived experience of occupation. This exhibition’s subject is timely; 2017 marks 100 years since the Balfour Declaration, the British colonial policy between 1917-1948 which resulted in the mass displacement of the Palestinian nation and people.

Within This Narrow Strip Of Land is a multi screen audio-visual installation. The work is a diverse collection of short films, installed here at different levels with overlapping sound. Ranging in style, source and technique; some are curious, some unsettling, some with accidental moments of beauty. Two are drawn from archives of the British Mandate period in Palestine (1917–48) from London’s Imperial War Museum. In Assemblage white men in pith helmets, assisted by local people, launch an observation balloon. As it rises, we become party to the process of mapping land which will be used to administrate future occupation. In Reel, off-cuts and discarded frames are edited together and set to a contemporary soundtrack. What was left out is re-viewed, evoking the deliberate blind spots in recorded history. In Light Drinks the Dark we move to present day Palestine; watching a boisterous stag party on a Dead Sea beach from afar. The soundscape of the installation alludes to the blurred borders of disputed territories. The disparate pieces create a refracted portrait which refuse a single perspective.

Quarries of Wandering Form explores the stone quarrying industry in Palestine’s West Bank. Composed of film and photographic work, the film White Oil II is installed here as a large double screen installation. The film, made over a three year period, is a subtle examination of the impact and workings of the occupation, where much of the material quarried is expropriated by Israeli authorities, used to build settlements and exported as Israeli stone. Moving from day to night Price documents the industrial process of the material extraction and moments in the personal lives of quarry owners, workers and security guards working there. The film is contrasted with a still photograph of an olive tree, damaged by the pollution from the quarries. The tree makes visible the effects of quarrying on the landscape and symbolises a region which is suffocated by the Occupation yet also resists and endures the violence against it.

Taken together the works in this exhibition inform the viewer and also challenge what we see. Price draws back from defining the stories she reveals and through this leaves space for new perspectives to be suggested.

Judy Price works across photography, moving image, sound and installation. She experiments with different techniques and ways of collecting material to address collective struggles and create new perceptions of the experiences of individuals and social groups. Price is a Course Director in Photography (MA) at Kingston University and a Senior Lecturer in Moving Image (BA) at the University of Brighton. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally including: UK (Imperial War Museum, Barbican, London and Tent Gallery, Edinburgh), Norway (Stiftelsen 3, 14, Bergen), Canada (Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal), Germany (Kunshaus Cinema) and Palestine (Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah and Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem).
 

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