Film space: invisible sculpture: Jane and Louise Wilson’s haptic visuality

Over the past decade, Jane and Louise Wilson have become known for their split-screen film installations, multi-screen environment(s) in which moving images are thrown on hanging screens and cubes. Their subject matter has comprised mainly of architectural sites of power such as the US Air Force base at Greenham Common, the Houses of Parliament the former headquarters of the Stasi in Berlin. They film these sites using a documentary style camera recording their journeys through these labyrinthine buildings.

What makes the installations unique is the manner in which the Wilsons juxtapose two diverse viewpoints of the same site across multiple screens. The artists film their individual passage through these buildings and sites on separate cameras then edit their material digitally to juxtapose and intercut their diverse viewpoints.
On the one hand, their filmic spaces are ostensibly constructed on geometric principles using the rectangle of the screen as a readymade framing device, however, the dual and/or multiple juxtapositioning of screens and spaces undermines the logic of the frame as a window onto another world.

In this essay I want to focus on one of their early works, Stasi City (1997), because of its spatial intensity as opposed to more recent installations such as A Free and Anonymous Monument (2003), which presented a range of sites across thirteen screens and two mirrors creating an architectural space whose peripatetic dispersal liquidated the intensity of the images somewhat. Early installations such as Stasi City (1997) engendered a claustrophobic spatiality which was both echoed and refused in the visually stunning sequences of images, echoed in the sense that the spectator was confronted with rooms and corridors with no way out, refused in the sense that the camera takes an alien perspective that hovers dispassionately over its subject.