Jane and Louise Wilson

Jane and Louise Wilson‘s work comprises of video projections, photographs taken during the filming process, and three-dimensional sculptures. They have exhibited widely around the world, including two person exhibitions at New Art Gallery, Walsall, Haunch of Venison, Zurich, De Appel, Amsterdam, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Serpentine Gallery, London and Bergen Art Museum, Norway. Group exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial 9, Glasgow Film Festival, MOMA, New York and FotoMuseum, Antwerp. They were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999.

Here they talk to APEngine about their film, Songs for My Mother, which was made for the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund & Film4′s Cinema Extreme scheme in 2009. The film is inspired by a set of wardrobe photographs Kubrick took for a movie he never made, which creates the backdrop for a relationship between two women: Kristina the actress and Esma the costume designer. Kristina and Esma have a lot in common as first and second-generation refugees from war torn areas of Europe. The film delves into their pasts, through a series of flashbacks, unravelling the hardships they have been through, the difficulty they have in connecting with their current environments and the similarities between them.