In partnership with Film and Video Umbrella and Waterbridge.

Friday 7 July 2006 - Saturday 29 July 2006 - open Tuesday - Saturday, 12 noon until 7 p.m

The Forbury Hotel Apartments Abbey Square Reading RG1 3BE

Admission free

Context

Film and Video Umbrella and Artists in the City, Reading have commissioned Turner prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing to create a new double-screen video installation. Arguably Wearing’s most ambitious project to date, Family History engages with our modern-day obsession with ‘reality’ and ‘celebrity’. The work re-examines the BBC’s pioneering 1974 documentary series ‘The Family’, featuring the daily life of the Wilkinses, a working-class family from Reading.

Family History is being premiered in The Forbury Hotel Apartments. Situated high above Reading, and with a panoramic view of the city that looks across to where the Wilkins family once lived, the apartment setting provides its own comment on the changing nature of home environments in the intervening years, and reflects on the architectural transformation of many of Britain’s urban spaces over a similar period of time.  Following its showing in Reading, ‘Family History’ will tour to Wearing’s home city, Birmingham, where it will open on 9 September.

Project

Family History offers a critique of how fly-on-the-wall documentary has been transformed by the advent of ‘reality television’ and its cultivation of ‘celebrity’. Heather Wilkins, the youngest daughter from the family - with whom Wearing identified at the time as a kind of surrogate older sister - is interviewed in a chat-show setting by Trisha Goddard,  a familiar face on day-time TV. Heather reflects on her time in the spotlight, and her life since then. The interview is interspersed with stills and clips from the original series. In contrast to the hyper-reality of the chat-show studio set, the second screen evokes hazy nostalgia. In a mock-up of her front room in 1970s Birmingham, a young Wearing lookalike watches ‘The Family’, surrounded by the detritus of the era.

Artist

Gillian Wearing’s film and video works combine powerful and provocative insights into the nature of personal identity and an intimate understanding of the language of documentary filmmaking.  Examples of her film and photographic work can now be found in galleries and museum collections around the world.  Recent exhibitions include ‘Snapshot’, Bloomberg Space, London 2005; ‘Local Stories’, Modern Art, Oxford 2006; ‘Of Mice and Men’, The Berlin Biennale 2006.

Gillian Wearing is represented by Maureen Paley, London

Maureen Paley/Interim Art