CGAC Valle Inclán s/n 15704 Santiago de Compostela Espagne
Curated by Isabel Carlos, Suspending Time is the largest individual exhibition ever produced by the British artists Jane & Louise Wilson in Spain. The exhibition ranges from their first work in video, Hypnotic Suggestion 505 (1993) until the most recent Songs for My Mother (2009). Apart from these two emblematic works, the exhibition will comprise films, photographs and previously unseen creations such a series of sculptures purposely produced for CGAC that play with the building's architecture: rulers that measure and mark the various exhibition spaces, beyond a suspended sculpture inspired by Rodchenko. Hypnotic Suggestion 505, presented for the first time in Oporto in 1993, in the context of the exhibition Walter Benjamin's Briefcase, curated by Andrew Renton, is based on a Jean Cocteau idea on the hypnotic effect that the cinema may exert upon the masses. In the projection, the artists renegade their consciousness and turn into voyeuristic objects for the audience.
The installations corresponding to the last five years surround the spectator, also defining a strong architectural presence in the rooms. This is the case of the pieces Spiteful of Dream (2008) created in Derby, producing a kaleidoscopic sequence from the movement of an enormous turbine; or Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009), bearing Stanley Kubrick's archive stills belonging to a never finished film on the Holocaust. The exhibition also includes a series of black and white photographs of the Second World War bunkers that had been used as a large network of fortresses in the coast of Normandy, bearing the marks of war, the memory of the conflict and the uselessness of present day that turns them into modern ruins.
Focused on the historic memory, the work of the Wilson twins recobres empty spaces, uncontrolled evacuated areas, or lost and abandoned spaces in a journey that deals as much with the psychological time, as with the archaeology of places and experiences transporting us to a suspended time. A suspended time among eras, the Second World War and present day; suspended among narratives, that of cinematography and the everyday life; suspended among artistic references, from Rodchenko to Kubrick. The exhibition catalogue, in its version produced by CGAC, will not only reproduce the works in the exhibition, it will also express the different ways in which these unfold in such different spaces as those of the Centro de Arte Moderno of the Fundação Gulbenkian in Lisbon and CGAC.