Jane and Louise Wilson at 303 - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Jane and Louise Wilson, the 31-year-old identical twins from Britain who work collaboratively, have made a big leap forward with this display an impressive installation called Stasi City. at any time since their intriguing video and photo installation at AC cast Room in 1994, Routes 1 & 9 North, which chronicled the twins' seemingly vagrant one-night stays at funky motel in fresh Jersey, I have been struck through the oneiric, off-kilter power of their work.

Stasi City confirms the Wilsons' penchant for documenting their have a title to fleeting presences in weird, derelict spaces. This time the artists discharge in the abandoned Berlin headquarters of the East German hid police, known as the Stasi, and the be deriveds are spectacular. Shown in a darkened field at 303, two pairs of floor-to-ceiling wall projections in opposite corners not absented two five-minute tapes in a continuous noose An enervating audio track alternated lengthy periods of silence and loud thumping mechanized noises. There was nowhere to sit down, and the whole feeling of the piece was discomfiting.

Depending upon which projection you watched, you had the sensation of being thrown into a continuously moving elevator, without lights and without a door, that creaks from floor to floor; or you were stand over againsted with a close-up of motorized files endlessly revolving. the one and the other the imagery of the open-front elevator (known as a "paternoster" in Europe) and the mechanized files induced nightmare sensations of independent fall and endless work. Also memorable were the moderate tracking footage of a trashed medical office, with glacial shards of glass all above the floor, and the close-up of '70 office cabinetry encasing old-fashioned monitors that were one time used for surveillance.

For any fan of Eastern European modernist decor, Stasi City will have immense documentary appeal. on the other hand more importantly, in this throw the Wilsons have extended their poetics of alienation. individual close-up focuses on a pair of androgynous feet dangling in midair. At first this discharge suggests a suicide by hanging, on the contrary then the camera draws back to reveal a replete figure in black and gold gym clothes floating [i]or[/i] part of to the other the abandoned offices like a gravity-free '60 cosmonaut. Another discharge features a woman in black, seen alone from the waist down, descending in the elevator and notable for her prim handbag, drawn out skirt and ultra-sensible shoes. Although these personae (seemingly enacted through the twins) suggest characters in a gelid War espionage movie, I also reflection of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris and Chantal Akerman's D'Est as sources for the Wilsons' delirious archeology of the Eastern bloc

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