Film and Video Umbrella

PROJECTS

Family History

2006

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing's latest project involves a return to The Family, the seminal BBC documentary from the Seventies.

On the first of two video screens, Heather Wilkins, the youngest daughter of the Reading-based family who were the subject of the original series, is interviewed by daytime doyenne Trisha Goddard in the surrogate home-from-home of a replica TV studio. Assessing both the personal and the cultural influence of the programme, and how the ambitions of fly-on-the-wall documentary have been overtaken by 'reality TV' and its cultivation of celebrity, this footage is contrasted with observational scenes that prompt their own uncanny flashback to the Seventies, in which a stand-in for the young Gillian Wearing watches television in a recreation of the front room of her former family home. Deftly mixing documentary portraiture and personal biography, Family History is a complex meditation on the changing face of British society, and television, over that time.

In a further twist that brings additional resonance to the project, the installation is being shown as part of a collaboration between Film and Video Umbrella and venues in Reading and Birmingham. For the first staging, Artists in the City (as part of an ongoing programme of artists' commissions) worked with Reading-based property developers, Waterbridge, to present Family History in the Forbury Apartments building, in one of the city's new and increasingly vibrant areas of regeneration. 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 provided its own comment on the changing nature of people's home environment in intervening years, and also reflects on the architectural transformation of many of Britain's urban spaces over a similar period of time.

The piece will shortly travel to Birmingham, Wearing's home town. From 9 September - 8 October 2006, Family History will be staged in a similar location; Brindley House, (next to the BT Tower) as an Ikon Gallery offsite project.

Associated Publications with Gillian Wearing:

Family History

Apartment 3, The Forbury Hotel Apartments, 07-Jul-06 to 29-Jul-06
Abbey Square reading Berkshire RG1 3BE

Ikon Gallery, 09-Sep-06 to 08-Oct-06
1 Oozells Square Birndleyplace Birmingham B1 2HS

National Film Theatre, 07-Nov-06 to 07-Nov-06
Belvere Road South Bank Waterloo London SE1 8XT