CCA Gallery exhibition a result of ‘happy collision’ between artists

Sunday 04 June 2023

The latest exhibition at CCA Galleries International has opened to the public, featuring artwork from a Turner Prize-nominated duo.

Entitled 'Entre Nous' – or "between us" in English – the new exhibition is about "collisions", according to the artists involved.

It brings together sculpture by Nicole Farhi and five photographic panels with silkscreen and glaze by the sibling duo Jane and Louise Wilson, who were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999.

The artists initially "collided" when they judged this year’s Jersey Summer Exhibition, a process which they first undertook independently and then met to make their final selection. Entre Nous was organised on the back of that meeting.

Louise Wilson said: "We call it collisions – it is a happy collision."

She added: "There is a symbiosis in terms of those collisions which you can’t over-think or over-articulate, you just want to have those happy connections."

Pictured: I’d Walk With You But Not With Her #3 by Jane and Louise Wilson.

Nicole Farhi, whose reputation was established first as a fashion designer but is now founded on sculpting the female form, explained that what she knew best about the Wilson sisters was the political focus of their work, combining media – often film and sound – to explore some of Europe’s least accessible and often most oppressive sites.

Their work Gamma, nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999, used art to interrogate the physical structures at Greenham Common which spoke of the darkest days of the Cold War.

"What you have done in the past and what you are still doing today," Ms Farhi said, addressing the duo, "is showing the horror of what has happened in the world, while I am showing the love. I like that contrast and I thought that was what we were going to see today."

She continued: "It is what people do to each other instead of loving each other. That’s how I saw the similarity between our work but actually it’s about nature; it’s about human beings; it’s about the world in which we live."

The female form that Ms Farhi explores in her pieces echo the natural forms that can be found in the sisters’ work.

"Always there tends to be the digital-moving image that is always a big part of what we are very interested in and you can see that reflected in these prints.

"Yes, they are printed surfaces and they have those surface qualities, but they are also digital images that are created," Ms Wilson said, adding that they are the product of two residencies on the protected sites of Gapado Island, South Korea and Ise City, Ise Prefecture in Japan.

Pictured top (from left to right): Louise Wilson, Jane Wilson and Nicole Farhi at CCA Galleries, alongside artwork I’d Walk With You But Not With Her #4 by Jane and Louise Wilson.