FestBuzz

What: Unfold­ing the Aryan Papers by Jane and Louise Wil­son
Where: Tal­bot Rice Gallery
When: Daily until 26 Sep­tem­ber.
How Much: Free.

In 140 char­ac­ters or less: “An exhi­bi­tion about lone­li­ness, iden­tity, absence and the own­er­ship of ideas.”

Jane and Louise Wilson’s lat­est exhi­bi­tion is Unfold­ing the Aryan Papers, cur­rently on dis­play at the Tal­bot Rice Gallery. This is a quiet, unpre­pos­sess­ing piece about the nature of iden­tity and the exis­tence of ideas. Based around Aryan Papers, a film the direc­tor Stan­ley Kubrick spent months plan­ning then decided not to make, the sis­ters delve into his archives and inter­view and film the woman who would have been the star of the film, Johanna ter Steege.

The film instal­la­tion itself, images of ter Steege from the past and present with her dis­em­bod­ied voice speak­ing can­didly, is caged with mir­rors on either side, repli­cat­ing the pic­tures to infin­ity on either side of the screen. This dupli­cat­ing cor­ri­dor cre­ates not only phys­i­cal depth within the gallery, but adds to the echo­ing of ter Steege’s mono­logue. The feel­ing of lone­li­ness and space is also present in the archived images on dis­play here.

Along­side the orig­i­nal rulers Kubrick used when scout­ing loca­tions, pho­tos of them can be seen in framed black and white spaces, steps, bridges and door­ways that caught the cinematographer’s eye. Images of ter Steege mimic these set ups. Often she is seen with her back to the cam­era, adding a sin­is­ter voyeuris­tic ele­ment to the exhi­bi­tion. While the actress does not come across as a vic­tim, she can be con­strued as an object lost in time and space, dis­posed of when no longer needed.

The fig­ure of Kubrick looms large in this exhi­bi­tion despite the lack of voice or phys­i­cal pres­ence: he is an absent father; a man play­ing god with the lives of oth­ers; the afore­men­tioned voyeur; the deist cre­ator who leaves his cre­ation to its own devices. The Wil­son sis­ters’ work is not about res­ur­rec­tion but about the con­tin­ued exis­tence of ideas even when the orig­i­na­tor aban­dons it. Kubrick was noto­ri­ous for his rig­or­ous plan­ning, but also for his self-censorship, par­tic­u­larly when he with­drew A Clock­work Orange in the early 1970s due to the furore sur­round­ing pos­si­ble copy­cat violence.

Aryan Papers is based on the Louis Beg­ley novel Wartime Lies, the story of a Jew­ish woman who adopts a Catholic iden­tity to escape Nazi Ger­many. The ideas of dis­guise, loss of iden­tity, per­for­mance and inner con­scious­ness are all drawn on in the Wil­son sis­ters’ piece. Ter Steege describes her­self as a “chameleon” when she researched and rehearsed the role: her unful­filled star­dom is pal­pa­ble in the room. This was not just the loss of a film, but the loss of a career. Phi­los­o­phy poses the ques­tion, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Per­haps the answer can be found in the res­o­nance and rever­ber­a­tion it causes afterwards.

This is a suc­cess­ful and intrigu­ing exhi­bi­tion: story-telling at its very best.

Fes­t­buzz Review:

Words: Elise Bramich