The twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson have been leading pioneers of video installation in Britain since the early 1990s.

Their work often features institutional spaces, and they have sometimes infiltrated and revealed sites of political or military power normally closed to public view. Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard was filmed in Kazakhstan, at four sites associated with the Russian space programme: Proton is the name of a rocket, Unity the launch site for manned space missions, Energy is an abandoned launch site and Blizzard a manned space shuttle craft. The viewer stands in the centre of two dual-screen projections, which are large enough to convey the monumentality of the immense vehicle transporters, the firing rocket engines and the wide panoramas of the Kazakh desert landscape. The second piece, Unfolding the Aryan Papers (above), reveals the hidden story of an unmade film, buried within the director Stanley KubrickÂ’s archives. Still photographs of wardrobe shoots and other documents lead the Wilsons to the Dutch actress, Johanna ter Steege, who had been lined up to play the main role in the film, The Aryan Papers, and whose life was devastated by the projectÂ’s cancellation. The film was to have been set against the historical background of the Holocaust and to have tracked the story of a Jewish woman and her son trying to escape persecution.

Provenance

The artists.


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