mark wallinger

Description

This summer, leading UK artists Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers have created new artworks for Turner Contemporary's spaces that respond to Margate. Mark Wallinger’s Sinema Amnesia is a special viewing space overlooking the sea behind the gallery. It shows the film The Waste Land, an ever-changing, endless picture of unfolding time. A lens is fixed to the structure recording the view out to sea. The recorded image is played back inside the space 24 hours later, like a delayed camera obscura. The film is inspired by T.S Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land, partially written on Margate Sands and exploring the disconnected time of modernity. Wallinger’s time machine calls memory and perception into question. Lindsay Seers’s film installation Entangled² captures a pair of female actresses dressed as men on the stages of Margate’s two great entertainment venues, the Theatre Royal and the Winter Gardens. Both theatres historically hosted scores of famous performers, and Seers takes particular interest in two male impersonators from early 20th century music hall, Hettie King and Vesta Tilley. As in all of Seers’s work, Entangled² weaves several narratives together: the actresses’ doubled identities connect to Seers's fascination with her great-great uncle’s condition Heterochomia, where different coloured eyes result from one twin subsuming the other in the womb. Entangled² sweeps visitors into a saucy seaside past where the boundaries between people blur.