Judy Rabinowitz Price

Judy Rabinowitz Price lives and works in London. Her art practice is research-based and includes photography, moving image and sound, composed as single-screen works and multiscreen installations.

A focus of her work is how art can produce different ways of thinking about contested landscapes and sites of geopolitical struggle, to make visible the different layers of representation, economy, history and subjectivity. Informed by the dialogue between art and ethnography her practice necessarily involves extensive field research often drawing on images and sounds from archival sources as well as the sustained study of a place or space. She often involves works collaboratively where the role of the artist as activist and ethnographer comes under scrutiny. Palestine has been an enduring focus of her work over the last 10 years.

In her long-form film and installation Quarries of Wondering Stone (2014-2017), Judy explored the quarries in the Occupied Palestine Territories as a both a physical, metaphorical and subjective space focusing on a culture's edges, endings, displacements and disappearances. The quarries are drawn on not just as industrial spaces where labour and excavation of stone take place, but also as the disruptive spaces of colonialism and globalization. In her film, White Oil Price elucidates our understanding and experience of the quarries and the spatial dynamics of the West Bank by weaving together complex layers of history, time and space through spoken texts, images and sound. This is performed through the owners, workers and security guard and the various complexities of interweaved communities. In this way, loss and absence come to bear with regard to personal histories and experiences as well as the changing landscape and conditions of the quarries. In this work relationships and community become as much part of Price’s métier as the image.

Her current research Architecture of the Bush explores the overwritten histories and redrawn boundaries of the Kruger National Park (KNP) in the Limpopo province, South Africa and Limpopo National Park which extends into Mozambique. Established under the 1926 National Parks Act, the KNP stretches for over 220 miles alongside South Africa's eastern perimeter and Mozambique and is a deeply contested landscape. Engaging with the spatial politics of the regions her research explores the complex political ecologies and entanglements of the KNP through the militarization of the area and its borders with Mozambique during the apartheid regime and today in post-apartheid South Africa. The research seeks to address the social and spatial inequalities within the Limpopo Province and bordering Mozambique and to what extent different social groups and peoples are defining the political ecology of the space and ancestral rights granted to displaced peoples from the KNP, as well as the ecology of human and non-human relations. The research traverses a number of disciplines bringing together artists, filmmakers, critical theorists, geographers, sociologists and lawyers.

Concurrently Judy is also working on new film and artwork that engages with the former site of the of Holloway Women's Prison in London that was decommissioned in 2016. Her research is embedded in the architecture of the prison (archival research, architectural, objects, sculptures, interiors and exteriors) and engages with the lived experiences of people and the history of the immediate vicinity of the area, including Penderyn Way that backs onto the existing site of Holloway, and where she has lived since 2006. The End of a Sentence draws on individual and collective stories of prison to make visible issues around gender, class, race and economy as well as reflecting on Holloway’s legacy spatially and ideologically as a site of remembrance and absence.

Judy studied Critical Fine Art Practice (BA), Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design London, Photography, Royal College of Art (MA), London and Media Arts Philosophy & Practice at Greenwich University, London as Associate Post-Grad Researcher. From 2008-9 she was Cocheme Fellow at the University of the Arts, London and associate artist from 2009-2010.  In 2014 she was awarded a PhD from the University of Creative Arts for her film White Oil and thesis, ‘White Oil and the Disappearance of the West Bank’ that focuses on the quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

She is currently a senior lecturer in Moving Image (BA), University of Brighton and course leader Photography (MA), Kingston University. From 2008–2014 she was a visiting lecturer at the International Academy of Art, Palestine and initiated a series of student exchange programs between Palestine and UK institutions. In 2013 she was a guest professor at Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg and associate Professor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Bergen, Norway from 2007-2008. Judy was a mentor for artists working with digital media on the Electric Green House residency, B3 Media, London and lead artist for a number of digital photography educational projects in London, including Southwark Somali Refugee Council, Deesha Community, Toynbee Hall and Shacklewell Primary School, London, commissioned by HS Projects and Insight Community Arts Programme (ICAP).

Solo exhibitions include Mosaic Rooms, London, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London, Wingsford Arts, Suffolk, Stiftelsen 3,14 and USF Centre, Bergen, Norway. Group exhibitions and screenings include: Qattan foundation, Ramallah, Palestinian Film Week, Cinema Akil, Dubai, Delfina Foundation, Imperial War Museum, Barbican, Curzon Cinema Soho, Curzon Cinema Goldsmiths, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, City Hall, Purcell Rooms at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, Tatton Biennale, Manchester, Cambridge Film festival and Tent Gallery, Edinburgh, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, Kunshaus Cinema, Nürnberg, Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation, Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Birzeit University Museum, Riwaq, Centre for Architectural Conservation Ramallah, Campus in Camps, Dheisheh Refugee Camp and Dar Annadwa Cultural Centre, Bethlehem and Al- Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem amongst others.

Judy is available to supervise students for MRes and PhD research.