Jane & Louise Wilson

For their first exhibition at Haunch of Venison, Zürich, Jane & Louise Wilson have created a new three-screen video installation Sealander (2006) and a series of largescale black-and-white photographs, which take as their subject what J.G. Ballard recently called "the architecture of death". Set within a provincial French landscape, these hulking forms were once the military bunkers, observation towers and blockhouses that made up the Atlantic Wall: the chain of coastal fortifications built along the western coast of Europe by the German Third Reich during World War II.

Now abandoned, but still retaining the pockmarks made by the shellfire of allied warships, the empty shells suggest the devastation wrought by human conflict. The imposing masses of the bunkers continue the Wilsons' interest in examining structures of power and ideology. Sixty years on from the Second World War, the bunkers now serve as concrete tombs, with their forms having assumed an aggressive, even paranoid, aspect and their Brutalist architecture having become largely synonymous with death. This distortion of classic Modernist principles – in particular the celebrated dictum 'form follows function' – is an ongoing preoccupation in the Wilsons' work. Past projects have addressed this idea within the context of post-war British architecture, investigating the realities of radical regeneration projects such as Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in the north of England. In the monochromatic video installation produced for this exhibition the bunkers are strikingly juxtaposed with the seductive undulations of a vampire squid, their unforgiving forms at odds with the squid's sensual anatomy. At first, the pairing of these seemingly incongruous objects is peculiar, evocative of Freud's idea of the unheimlich, or uncanny. However, further examination reveals deeper correspondences between the two forms and a sustained tension between ideas of envelopment and exposure, transparency and opacity, the geometric and the organic.

Since they began collaborating in 1989, Jane & Louise Wilson have consistently explored the phenomenology of architecture through the various sites they have filmed: casinos in Las Vegas, the Houses of Parliament in London, and sanatoriums in New Zealand, among others. Of primary interest to the artists are the darker, more unsettling aspects of the Modernist legacy: its claims to an heroic and utopian project and its associations with authority, surveillance and control. To this end they are interested in exploring how a space is animated not only physically, but imaginatively and psychologically.

In addition to the new body of work, the Wilsons' exhibition at Haunch of Venison, Zürich, includes The New Brutalism, a series of colour photographs inspired by archival images of a 1900s women's exercise class in New Zealand. Nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999, Jane & Louise Wilson have exhibited extensively both within Britain and internationally. In 2003 the twins undertook a BALTIC commission that resulted in the ambitious multi-screen video installation A Free and Anonymous Monument. Their haunting portrait of the headquarters of the East German secret police Stasi City (1997) is currently included in the exhibition Out of Time: A Contemporary View at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will be exhibited at SF MoMA from 20 October, 2006 – 21 January, 2007.

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Jane & Louise Wilson