Born in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) in 1967, the sisters combine video, photography, and sound in conceptual investigations of visibility and invisibility in relation to power structures. Their work came to international prominence through projects for which they accessed restricted, politically charged sites such as military facilities, government buildings, and border zones. Among the locations they filmed and photographed are a former Stasi prison, “Star City,” the training complex of the Russian space programme, and Chernobyl. From the material gathered, they develop video installations that offer new, often unsettling experiences of space. Fragmented architectures and bodies condense, architecture emerges as a repository of memory and shifting value systems.
As identical twins, Jane and Louise Wilson share a distinctive sensitivity to the relationships between perception, matter, image, and identity – especially their fractures. Architectural, medial, and psychological layers intersect in their work; equally central are the suggestive powers of cinema, visual language and hypnosis, as well as camouflage and facial recognition as phenomena of control. Mirrorings, duplications and visual shifts permeate their practice, highlighting the surreal and irrational dimensions of the modern structures surrounding us.
Juliane Duft
