Turner Contemporary announces film commissions by Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers

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New site-specific film commissions by internationally acclaimed artists Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers will be on show at Turner Contemporary from now until 5 August 2012. The films respond to Margate and use footage filmed in locations around the town. Wallinger connects Margate’s unique geographical position to literary history, while Seers reflects saucy seaside entertainments through questions of sexual identity and doubling.

Realized in collaboration with Jacqui Davies and the University for the Creative Arts (School of Fine Art), the commissions see Turner Contemporary exhibiting the work in unusual spaces, as both are installed outside of the galleries designed by David Chipperfield Architects. Wallinger’s Sinema Amnesia sits adjacent to the sea wall behind the gallery, and Seers’ Entangled² takes audience members into a secret location in the building.

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. Sinema Amnesia is a new version of a project first created in Çanakkale, Turkey in 2010.

Lindsay Seers’ film installation Entangled² captures a pair of 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 Seers’ work, Entangled² weaves several narratives together: the actresses’ doubled identities connect to Seers' fascination with her great-great uncle’s condition, heterochromia, 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.

Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers were commissioned by curator Jacqui Davies and a partnership between University for the Creative Arts and Turner Contemporary. Both commissions are free to enter and are open Tuesday to Sunday, with entry to Sinema Amnesia during gallery opening hours (10am–6pm) and performances of Entangled² on the hour throughout the day (11 a.m.–4 p.m.).