Elizabeth Price's SLOW DANS Video Trilogy Explores Postindustrial Hauntings at London's Assembly Room

Elizabeth Price's SLOW DANS video trilogy presents haunting visions of postindustrial and technocratic worlds through three major works. KOHL (2018) features unexplained 'visitants' appearing in contemporary spaces like carparks and data centers, with references to closed English collieries and CGI ferns resembling men's necktie patterns. FELT TIP (2018) creates associative links between business ties, digital weaving looms, and microchips through a hallucinatory presentation narrated by near-future administrators. THE TEACHERS (2019) depicts academics who become voluntarily mute, replacing speech with sounds mimicking office noises like mouse clicks and keyboard clatter. The exhibition is co-commissioned by Artangel and installed in The Assembly Room, a nineteenth-century public space in South London. Price's decade-long practice combines pop music aesthetics with research-driven examinations of labor, industry, and sociality. Her disembodied voice-synthesizers and animated captions narrate fables reconstituted from archaeological fragments and unreliable archives. The works explore themes of deindustrialization, managerialism, gender blurring, and the bureaucratization of knowledge. The exhibition runs until 25 October, with the pandemic adding resonance to its themes of vanished collectivity.