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The Woolworths Choir of 1979

The Woolworths Choir of 1979 is a single-screen, 25-minute narrative video, incorporating live action, motion graphics and sound. It is intended for presentation as a gallery installation, although it is also occasionally screened in theatrical settings. The video draws upon various archival sources, including a public archive of 19th and 20th photography of ecclesiastical architecture, an informal internet archive of musical performance, and BBC and public film archives relating to news events, and convenes them to narrate and reflect upon the processes and themes of assembly. These include modes of artistic bricolage, forms of social and political assembly, and structures of knowledge organisation.

The first version of the work was produced during the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, St John’s College, Oxford and the British School at Rome. The work was premiered in a solo show at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2011 and has since been shown at the Edinburgh Arts Festival, The New Museum, New York, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Bielefelder Kunstverein. It has been purchased by the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna a Contemporanea Torino and the Arts Council Collection in 2011.

The second version of the work was premiered in the artist’s solo show Here at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead for which she was nominated for and won the Turner Prize 2012. The video comprised the artist’s contribution to the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain and has since been presented at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The Woolworths Choir of 1979 has been purchased by the Tate Collection, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Stedelijk Museum and De Hallen, Haarlem, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.