Archive 2008-09
Jane and Louise Wilson
- Venue: Fine Art Lecture Theatre
- Start: Wed, 20 May 2009 11:00:00 BST
- End: Wed, 20 May 2009 13:00:00 BST
Interviews:
They like to create the sensation of a human presence both there and not there. After art school, they took a flat in King's Cross and began making short films of motel and bed-and-breakfast rooms, the mundane details of which occupy this same depersonalised hinterland. In their more recent work, they have expanded this aesthetic and looked for similar dislocations in entire buildings in order to recreate charged and alienating spaces in galleries.
Stasi City, the first of these ambitious pieces, is like Kafka animated. They were, they say, obsessed with the history of this vast complex, which had been a catering depot for the Nazis and an internment camp for Stalin's Russia, before becoming the sprawling home of East German intelligence. It was the debris of the vast bureaucracy that interested them the most: 'Rooms full of files that existed in a limbo; doors that had not been opened since the Wall came down.' The Wilsons' camera penetrates and dismantles this secrecy; it glides down the strip-lit passageways and into functional 'interview' rooms; an old-fashioned phone on a drab chair, in this alien context comes to stand for an entire ideology.
The film is paired in some respects with Gamma, the film the Wilsons made at Greenham Common. They were amazed, given the resonance of the site, that no one had beaten them to it: 'People are nicking copper wire and everything all the time,' Louise says. 'But no one had been in and photographed the place. The silos will be handed over to the town council in 2001, so we had to do it before then.'