Jane and Louise Wilson RA
Festival of Ideas
Saturday 4 May 2019 5.30 - 6.30pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
£15, £9
The Turner Prize nominated artists, identical twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson discuss their fascination with politics, surveillance and conflict.
Jane and Louise Wilson RA Elect graduated with joint degree shows in Dundee and Newcastle before studying together at Goldsmiths College. Since then they have gained a national and international reputation as artists who create haunting installations using film, photography and sound. Through their work they have explored some of Europe’s least accessible sites, including a former Stasi Prison, the British Houses of Parliament and the huge Star City complex in Moscow, a key site of the Russian Space Programme. In this conversation with the RA’s Artistic Director, Tim Marlow, they talk about the rewards and challenges of working together, their obsessions with the recent past and why they feel they have a responsibility to respond to the political and social issues of the day.
In 1996 they were awarded a DAAD artists scholarship in Berlin and Hanover. In 1999 they were nominated for The Turner Prize for their multi-screen installation, Gamma, which was shown in 2015 at The Schaulager Museum, Basel, in the exhibition FUTURE/PRESENT. Their recent exhibitions include In Focus: Jane and Louise Wilson's Sealander, J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2017) Divided We Stand, Busan Biennial, Korea (2018) and Jane and Louise Wilson: Stasi City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018-19).
This event will be followed by a Q&A.