Maureen Paley is pleased to announce a new exhibition The Toxic Camera by Jane and Louise Wilson presented across our two London spaces. The Wilson twins have been working together for over 30 years. From early on their work often examined liminal zones of exclusion, abandoned military sites and buildings. Working within an expanded field of photography, their work has dealt both directly and indirectly with the ways populations and governments impact the environments we live in. This exhibition will mark the 10-year anniversary of their film The Toxic Camera (2012).
At Three Colts Lane, the film installation The Toxic Camera (2012) revisits the narrative of the Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986. One of the most significant ecological catastrophes humankind has ever seen, Chernobyl is also one the greatest nuclear disasters to date, followed years after by the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011.
Jane and Louise Wilson will also present Konvas Avtomat, The Toxic Camera (2012), a bronze cast and replica of Shevchenko’s 16mm film camera alongside a series of collages entitled Imperial Measure that use the recurring motif of a yardstick placed within each of the images. These collages are based on archive images of the once thriving community that lived and worked within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The photographs encourage us to stare back into the past through abandoned manmade spaces, while the yardsticks (relating to an imperial standard of measurement now fallen into disuse) play with notions of interpretation, memory, material fact, and that which is recorded, measured, and analysed. Hinting towards the historic relevance of the ‘future ruin’ and manifesting an Imperialist past in the present, the measures point to the architecture of forensics and camouflage, as well as the obsolete.
During their research for The Toxic Camera in Kyiv in 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster incident occurred, caused by a tsunami following an earthquake. Despite the many earlier studies which had highlighted the risks of building a coastal nuclear power station in Japan, as with Chernobyl, there was a false belief in the state's ‘technological infallibility.’ In 2021, the Catholic bishops of Japan and Korea voiced their opposition to the plan to release the contaminated water from the cooling systems into the Pacific Ocean, citing opposition by fisheries, local prefecture councils, and the governor of Jeju Province. The storage tanks used to store the water from the power plant are expected to be filled by this summer 2022.
In 2018, Jane and Louise Wilson spent three months working and living on Gapado Island, part of Jeju Province, South Korea, situated in the South China sea. Gapado is a tiny Carbon-Free Island with 170 residents, dedicated to maintaining a ‘sustainable ecosystem’. The island is home to the Haenyo female free divers who, much like the Amu in Japan, work collectively together to make their living from a sustainable practice of fishing. At Studio M, Transmission (2020) presents the fragile interaction between human and natural environments and documents a giant lava stone in Jeju, South Korea. This is presented alongside new sculptures made by steam-formed Ash that includes a replica of the Wilson twins DNA structure, HID140415_025 HID140415_027 (2022) accompanied by their Personal Identical Twin Test Certificate.
