The exhibition Altogether by Jane and Louise Wilson at 303 Gallery presents a powerful meditation on spaces. Their work both physical and psychological lingers on the edges of history, function, and memory. Spanning over thirty years of their collaborative practice, the show traces a thematic arc from decaying infrastructural sites to more intimate, endangered cultural practices. The Wilson twins explore what it means to be other through restricted, inaccessible spaces: abandoned military sites and derelict structures that speak to broader shifts in global politics and societies. Their photographs, video installations, and sculptures consider the intangible, psychological impacts that question what it means for a body to inhabit space, and how can such a space can be shared.
Among the earliest works on view are photographs from their 1994 series Routes 1 & 9 North, depicting the neglected interiors of run-down New Jersey motels along what was once the main route to New York. In one of these anonymous interiors in the Skyway Motel the artists were filmed under hypnosis—suspended between re-enactment and performance, between agency and submission. The act became a quiet way to surrender control—to each other, to the camera, and to the space. Under hypnosis, the line between watcher and watched is muted, held in the stillness of a room.
Subsequent investigations have led to projects in sites that have included Star City, the Russian space training center just outside of Moscow and a remote oil rig platform in the Gulf of Mexico; Denniston, a former mining town, and an abandoned, World War I-era state sanatorium, both located on New Zealand’s South Island; and Orford Ness in Suffolk, England, a former atomic weapons research establishment, among others. Blending documentary aesthetics with a poetic, haunted sensibility, their work makes memory visible—what they describe as “psychic architecture.”
At the centre of the exhibition is Altogether (2010), a sculptural work constructed from multiple wooden yardsticks. Both imposing and fragile, the piece detaches the object from its original function, questioning systems of measurement and perception. It draws from Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions (1924), echoing the Constructivist spirit while underscoring the Wilsons’ ongoing concern with material instability and conceptual boundaries.
The exhibition concludes with a new video work combining material filmed in South Korea and Japan. Drawing upon two recent artist residencies in both, the film captures the mysticism of lava rock formations and the traditions of the Ise Ondo, a female folk-dance collective dating to the Edo period. Sea urchins, turban shells, and scarecrows are layered onto shrine architecture and volcanic landscapes, merging reverie with disappearance against a backdrop of rising seas and climate change. Scenes from Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine—ritually rebuilt every twenty years are interwoven, filmed with a Bolex camera and mirrors. Through shifting light, ritual dances, and refracted imagery, the work reflects on cycles of fragility and renewal. The Wilsons evoke not just disappearing worlds, but the quiet, uneasy beauty of their Resilience.
The exhibition is both a look back and a continuation, drawing connective lines between seemingly disparate geographies and histories through a shared atmosphere of spectral presence and impermanence. It speaks not only to what has been lost, but to the subtle forces that persist in the places and sites they uncover.
Jane and Louise Wilson were born in Newcastle and received their MAs at Goldsmiths College of Art, London. They began working together in 1989 and were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999. In 2018, their multi-channel video installation Stasi City, 1997, was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Solo exhibitions include The Getty Center, Los Angeles; Imperial War Museum, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, Serpentine Gallery, London; and Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal. They have been included in recent group exhibitions at the Schaulager, Basel, Brooklyn Museum, New York, The Royal Academy, London; Tate Britain, London, Tate Modern, London, LACMA, Los Angeles and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. The artists live and work in London.
