Film and Video Umbrella

PUBLICATIONS

Family History

Essays by Steven Bode, Paul Morley and an 'in conversation' with Stuart Comer

A record of Gillian Wearing's video installation 'Family History', this immaculately designed publication traces the development of this project in a visual style whose distinctive aesthetic draws out parallels between the 1970s and the present that are such a feature of the work itself. Continuing the biographical theme of the exhibition, the book brings together film stills and location photographs with other personal and archive material, and features essays by critic Paul Morley and project curator Steven Bode, alongside an 'in conversation' between Gillian Wearing and Stuart Comer

Gillian Wearing's two-screen video installation 'Family History' is landmark piece that returns to the seminal BBC series 'The Family'. 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, it also evokes life in the Seventies, as experienced by both Heather Wilkins (the youngest daughter of the Reading-based family who were the subject of the series) and by the young Gillian Wearing (who watched it avidly in her front room in Birmingham)

Published by Film and Video Umbrella and Maureen Paley, in association with Artists in the City, Reading and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Publication supported by Arts Council England, with additional support from Film London Artists' Moving Image Network

March 2007
280 x 216 mm portrait
Hardback
80 pp full colour

Associated Projects with Gillian Wearing:

Family History, 2006