Twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson collaborate across photography and moving image works to explore historical and politically charged spaces from recent history.
Read MoreThe twins were born in 1967 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Heading off to art school together, they graduated in 1989 with a joint degree show in Dundee and Newcastle. The show featured their collaborative work Garage (1989–1993), a large black-and-white photograph in which the pair attempt to murder each other by hanging and drowning.
After moving to London, they completed an MA course at Goldsmiths College, London. During this period they began to film unconventional or seedy dwelling spaces like bed and breakfasts, and odd sensory experiences such as taking LSD for the first time.
Jane and Louise Wilson's photographic and video works reflect on the failed ambitions of Modernism, often involving transhistorical explorations of former sites of power and surveillance.
Early works shows photographs and filmed performances like Hypnotic Suggestion (1993), in which the twins are shown under hypnosis. This followed with Stasi City (1997), a four-screen projection staged at the former Stasi police headquarters in East Berlin.
Other video works explored the Houses of Parliament (A Third House, 1999), Russian rocket deployments in Kazakhstan (Dreamtime, 2001), the Apollo Pavilion designed by British architect Victor Pasmore (Free and Anonymous Monument, 2003), and former Nazi buildings.
In 1999, Jane and Louise Wilson were nominated for the Turner Prize for the exhibition Gamma at Lisson Gallery, London. The four-screen video installation, life-size sculptures, and photographs documenting the filming process recalled the Wilsons' experience at Greenham Common, an American armament in England that housed missiles during the Cold War.
Accompanied by life-sized models of objects and surroundings from Greenham Common, Gamma captured the historical controversies at the now-abandoned site showing footage of vacant decontamination rooms, surveillance systems, and evocative signs like the 'No Alone Zone'.
The 2006 exhibition at Lisson Gallery, titled The New Brutalists took the form of an installation of videos and large-scale photographs of former military outposts for the German Third Reich with a focus on the deployment of brutalist architecture for violent ends.
The exhibition started from a digital photograph of the same name made in 2004, in reaction to a proto-feminist suffragette image from 1910 featured in an Architectural Review article from 1953 titled 'The New Brutalism'.
In the photograph, gymnasts are staged engaging in different exercises, conscious of being watched. Their postures are playful and retain a timeless quality, alluding to this ongoing process of surveillance and self-surveillance.
In 2009, Jane and Louise Wilson created Unfolding the Aryan Papers, for Animate Projects and British Film Institute commission, which recovers an unmade film from The Stanley Kubrick Archives about the story of a Polish Jew wanting to save herself and her family from the Nazis.
The work recreates the film from Kubrick's extensive research, including stills of the protagonist Johanna, images from the archive of scenes Kubrick wanted to create, followed by footage of Johanna coming into action, 15 years later. Unfolding the Aryan Papers is a complex and poignant work that is 'as much about a film that never happened as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress Johanna ter Steege'.
Jane and Louise Wilson were the recipients of the 1993 Barclays Young Artist award, as well as nominees of the 1999 Turner Prize. In 2018, they were elected Joint Royal Academicians at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Jane and Louise Wilson's works have been shown widely in Europe, the UK, Asia, and North America.
Solo exhibitions include Maureen Paley, London (2022); Sorbonne Art Gallery, Paris (2021); Getty Center, Los Angeles (2017); Imperial War Museum, London (2014); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2012); The B.F.I Gallery, London (2009); Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2009); Lisson Gallery, London (2005); Turner Prize 1999, Tate Gallery; and Serpentine Gallery, London (1999).
Group exhibitions include Musée d'Arts de Nantes (2020); Royal Academy, London (2020); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2019); Tate Modern, London (2014); Tate Britain, London (2014); Sharjah Biennial (2011); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2003); Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2003); Istanbul Biennial (2001); Korean Biennial (2000); and Carnegie International (1999).
The artists live and work in London.
The artists' website can be found here, their instagram here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2022
