Press Gallery, House of Commons, Parliament

Jane and Louise Wilson's multiscreen video projections immerse the viewer in places usually hidden from public view-difficult-to-access and politically charged sites around the globe, from the former headquarters of the East German secret police to a decommissioned nuclear missile base. Drawing upon a wide array of aesthetic strategies of disorientation, from Picturesque theory to classic horror movies of the 1970s, the Wilsons place the viewer at the uneasy intersection of architectural space and social control.
In 1999 the artists were invited to create a project for London's Serpentine Gallery. England was consumed in a debate that ultimately led to the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords-a major constitutional reform in British politics. The Wilsons negotiated permission to film the Houses of Parliament during summer recess. The resulting 16mm film and accompanying large-scale photographs present a dizzying kaleidoscopic view of the corridors of power that interlaces the mesmerizing patterns and colors of Pugin's Neo-Gothic Gesamtkunstwerk with the communications network of security cameras, microphones, and tape recorders woven throughout the site that constitute the circulatory system of our own global media moment. Press Gallery, House of Commons shows a part of Westminster that is not openly accessible to either members of Parliament or their staffs. It also represents a vanished historical moment when reporters ran from the many-peopled theater of grand-scale decision-making to these quaint little cocoons-now, of course, replaced by cell phones and laptops-to relay news to the world.