The video artist Elizabeth Price, whose work splices together images, sounds and texts dealing with subjects as disparate as 1960s girl bands and a tragic chain-store fire in the late 1970s, won this year's coveted Turner Prize.
Jude Law presented Ms. Price, 46, with the £25,000 (about $40,000) award at a ceremony at Tate Britain in London on Monday night.
The prestigious although much maligned prize, given every year to a British artist under 50, was awarded to Ms. Price for a recent exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, in Northeast England, that included “The Woolworth's Choir of 1979,†a 20 minute film that begins with drawings of Gothic architecture and ends with footage of the fire, which killed 10 people in Manchester. She is the first video artist to win the Turner Prize for over a decade.
In citing its reason for selecting Ms. Price, the jury said it “admired the seductive and immersive qualities,'' of vi deo installations, and her melding of genres “from archival footage and popular music videos to advertising strategies.''
Ms. Price, a former 1980s pop musician who was a member of the group Talulah Gosh, said of her work, “I use digital video to try and explore the divergent forces that are at play when you bring so many different technological histories together.''
She beat out Paul Noble, who is known for his pencil drawings dotted with letters of the alphabet and forms suggesting excrement; Luke Fowler, another filmmaker, who created a trilogy of cinematic collages about the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing; and Spartacus Chetwynd, a performance artist who lives in a South London nudist colony and uses puppets, costumes and props in his work. Ms. Price is the least known of the group.
Past winners of the 84-year-old prize include such notable figures as Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor and Martin Boyce.
