Louise Wilson
2021Suspended Island
Jane Wilson, Louise Wilson
In a moment of national reflection and anxiety, artists Jane and Louise Wilson contemplate the island mentality of contemporary Britain and its history as a colonial empire. Eerily empty shots of the Palace of Westminster and Parliament presented across two screens show a Britain with an uncertain, ghostly future.
Suspended Island
Undead Sun
Jane Wilson, Louise Wilson
Jane and Louise Wilson’s Undead Sun is a large-scale video installation that looks back at the seismic impact of the First World War and considers how so many of the products of that conflict continue to shape our contemporary experience. At its heart is a now-familiar pattern of military action – new and hard-learned in the First World War – in which control of the airspace assumes as much strategic importance as the campaign on the ground. This desire for panoramic overview, to rise beyond the deadlock of the trenches, brings with it its own rapid advances (in camera optics and other technological innovations) but also its counter-measures, as armies seek to hide their movements and positions from this ever-present eye-in-the-sky. Alluding to the unceasing threat of exposure from above, Undead Sun highlights these earthbound, subterranean arts of concealment and camouflage, as well as the unremarked, invisible contribution made by women to this facet of the war.
Undead Sun
Stasi City
Jane Wilson, Louise Wilson
This four-channel video installation was shot inside the abandoned headquarters of the defunct East German secret police—unofficially called Stasi City— a few years after the reunification of Germany. Images of the labyrinth of abandoned corridors, interrogation rooms, and open and closed doors are accompanied by a soundtrack of the clanging, buzzing, and clicking sounds that would have been emitted by surveillance equipment when police occupied the building. Stasi City is an imprint of the haunting memories embedded in architecture.
Stasi City
