This exhibition brings together two bodies of recent work by acclaimed British artists Jane and Louise Wilson: Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum), 2010 and the UK premiere of Face Scripting What Did the Building See?, 2011.
Commissioned by Forma to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) is a suite of large-scale photographic prints. These images depict deserted interiors from the now almost entirely abandoned town of Pripyat, situated within the 30km wide Exclusion Zone. The richly textured images include a kindergarten, a theatre and a swimming pool, all of which explicitly reveal the hurried nature of their abandonment.
Face Scripting What Did the Building See? was inspired by the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, a Hamas operative, in a Dubai hotel room in January 2010. The two-part film installation shows the artists own film alongside real CCTV footage that was compiled, and subsequently released on YouTube, by the Dubai state police. This work is an intensely detailed study of the site of the assassination and a meditation on current trends in surveillance techniques. Face Scripting What Did the Building See? was made in collaboration with Shumon Basar and Eyal Weizman.
Jane and Louise Wilson were born in Newcastle and studied respectively at Newcastle Polytechnic and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee. They began working together in 1989 and the following year undertook an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Since then they have exhibited at major galleries internationally and were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999.