Redistribution is an ongoing multimedia project by Seth Price that has unfolded since 2007, when it first appeared as a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum. What began as a recorded artist talk has evolved into a continuously re-edited and reconfigured work that is part essay film, part personal archive, part philosophical inquiry. Each version revisits and transforms what came before. In recent incarnations, Redistribution appears as immersive installations that include text, objects and the newest edit of the film, foregrounding the act of revision as both form and content, allowing viewers multiple entry points into the work.

Constructed from an ever-expanding collage of image, sound, and narration, the work traces the circulation of culture through time. Whether Palaeolithic cave painting or Renaissance allegory, industrial plastics or the endlessly mutable space of the internet, through montage and commentary, Price examines how meaning migrates across mediums, how materials and ideas mutate through reproduction, and how technology reframes both art and selfhood.

Recent iterations have introduced a more intimate register. Interwoven with earlier theoretical material are glimpses of Price’s everyday life: riding a bike through the woods, making wooden sculptures during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, and speaking with his daughter about fear and belonging. These quiet, diaristic moments complicate the work’s earlier detachment, shifting its tone from analytical to affective, from the critique of mediation to the experience of being mediated. It’s in these moments that time itself, as a contextual apparatus, becomes fully charged. Price reminds his daughter of her age when particular works were made as they browse his archive. Parallel histories are revealed that conflate the concerns of art with those of a personal life. The thoughts and observations of a young Price in 1990’s New York, steeped in the sub-cultural concerns and anxieties of the time share space with his daughter’s reflections at a similar age in the 2020’s. Her forensic understanding of millennial and Gen-Z preoccupations and critical concerns imbibe the same material with transgenerational and transhistorical significance.