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Shumon Basar, Eyal Weizman, Jane & Louise Wilson
Face Scripting: What Did the Building See?, 2011
Single screen projection, surround sound
Gauze box: 900 x 600 cm
2 mirrors: 300 x 380 cm each
1 HD projector, CCTV monitor
Installation view
Co-produced by the Farook Foundation with support from Luis Augusto Teixeira de Freitas and Mohammed Abdulkader Hafiz
Image courtesy of the Artists
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
Jane and Louise Wilson's atmospheric and theatrical works are often realised as split-screen film environments where the projected images are suspended at uneasy angles forcing viewers to both physically negotiate the exhibition space while navigating the unfolding narrative of the work itself. For the Sharjah Biennial 9, they presented Spiteful of Dream (2008) where the stories of Bosnian and Herzegovina refugees are heard over filmed footage from Rolls-Royce and Bombardier factories. The factories are located in Derby near one of the UK's main processing centres for refugees and asylum seekers.
The Wilsons have been working together since 1992 and were shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999. They have had solo presentations at Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2010); New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (2007); the Bergen Art Museum, Norway (2004); de Appel, Netherlands (2004); the MIT List Visual Arts Centre Cambridge, USA (2000) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (1999).
Group exhibitions include those at Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2010); the British Film Institute Gallery, London (2009); the Sharjah Biennial (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Val-de-Marne, France (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2006) and Guggenheim Bilbao (2003-04).
Their work is found in public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Tate, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Jane Wilson recieved a BA in Fine Art from Newcastle Polytechnic (1989) and Louise Wilson recieved a BA in Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (1989). Both went on to graduate with an MFA from Goldsmiths College of Art, London in 1992.
They were the recipients of the 1993 Barclays Young Artist Award and a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Berliner Kunstlerprogramm award in 1996. Jane and Louise Wilson were born in 1967 in Newcastle, England and have worked and exhibited together throughout their careers.
October 2010
These Artists were part of Sharjah Biennial 9 and 10
Face Scripting is a story, that ghosts the Dubai Police’s forensic film. It rehearses the generic architectural syntax of hotel rooms, corridors and lobbies – those thresholds of blank transition.
Accompanying and complementing the main premise of Sharjah Biennial 10, Plot for a Biennial explores the concept of a ‘conversation’ through printed matter.
This catalogue accompanied Sharjah Biennial 8, which attempted to renegotiate the relationship between art and ecology into a system of cohabitation.
The second book in the Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change series, documents Sharjah Biennial 8 as it was on view.