The Toxic Camera 2012 (16mm Film Stills)

These two stills are from Jane and Louise Wilson's film The Toxic Camera, made in Ukraine in 2012. The work was inspired by the filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko, one of the first to document the Chernobyl disaster. His camera became so contaminated with radiation that it was said to be “toxic,” which for us became a powerful metaphor: what happens when the tool used to reveal truth absorbs the damage it seeks to capture?
In the diptych, you see scientists navigating a crumbling building in one frame, and children playing near a torn fence in the other, capturing the contrast between past catastrophe and the persistence of everyday life. Together they hold a tension between past and future—between attempts to control a disaster and the lives that carry on in its wake. The work is a reflection on resilience, memory, and the futures shaped by histories we cannot erase.

Jane and Louise Wilson (b.1967) are identical twin sisters who have been working as an artist duo in collaboration for over two decades. Since 1990, they have gained a national and international reputation as artists working with photography and the moving image, installation in an expanded form of cinema and lens-based media. Through carefully choreographed film installations, sound works and photography they have explored some of Europe’s least accessible sites, including a former Stasi Prison in former East Berlin, the British Houses of Parliament and the Star City complex in Moscow, a key site of the Russian Space Program. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, US; Busan Biennial, KR; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US.