Jane & Louise Wilson have spent more than 30 years navigating the haunted interstices of history, architecture, and collective memory. Born in Newcastle in 1967, the twin sisters first came to prominence with installations like Stasi City (1997), filmed within the former East German Ministry of State Security. Their early work defined a signature approach: immersive, multi-screen video installations that transform abandoned or secretive buildings into sites of psychological resonance – often setting institutional interiors against broader political narratives. Their 1999 piece Gamma, shot at the decommissioned Greenham Common Air Force base, earned them a Turner Prize nomination alongside Tracey Emin, Steven Pippin and Steve McQueen, and secured them a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery.
In 2019, Jane & Louise Wilson were shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize with Suspended Island – a 16-minute outdoor film installation that weaves together archived footage of the Houses of Parliament, Trinity House in Newcastle, and Governors Island in Manhattan. Commissioned for the Great Exhibition of the North (2018), Suspended Island interrogated the meaning of “island” amidst Brexit negotiations by exploring geographic and ideological isolation. The piece combined footage, animation, and refugee testimonies, articulating how distance and cultural borders shape perception, memory, and belonging.
This July, the Wilsons present Performance of Entrapment at Bloomberg SPACE, taking their investigation into the architecture of power, secrecy and ritual to a global scale. The newest installation explores a discourse across time and continents, tracing parallels between the subterranean Temple of Mithras beneath Bloomberg’s European headquarters and Ise Jingū, the sacred Shinto shrine in Japan. Both sites date to the 1st–3rd centuries CE: one hidden beneath modern finance, the other periodically rebuilt above ground. These two places – a male-only Roman cult and a matrilineal Shinto tradition – form the opposing poles of a structural and symbolic polarity on which the Wilsons perform their latest translation.
At the centre of the installation is a newly filmed work featuring the Ise Ondō, a traditional female folk-dance collective dating from the Edo period. Filmed with unprecedented access to the sacred precincts of Ise Jingū, the dancers move through ancient cedar bridges and gravel courts in circular choreographies that evoke cycles of planting, harvesting, worship, and renewal. The film is projected onto a suspended mirror – a polished disc that splits reflection and projection front and centre – while a second channel cascades across a lash of LED screens that resemble both liturgical veils and digital membranes. This duality of projection and reflection frames duality itself: gender, centralisation and concealment.
The title Performance of Entrapment hints at the tension between constraint and ceremony. Mithraic rites, concealed beneath Bloomberg’s floors, traditionally excluded women, while Ise’s rituals are bound to patrilineal and ancestral codes. The Wilsons explore how rites of passage and renewal are simultaneously liberating and prescribing, creating networks of power disguised as cultural continuity. As viewers move through the mirrored projection and LED veil, they enact the same oscillation between revelation and reflection that their film conjures – caught between seeing inside and perceiving beyond.
Sound – in many respects a psychological underpinning of the installation – melds archival drone with field recordings: cicadas in Japanese forests, footsteps on stone, distant voices. These audio elements thread across continents and epochs, spatialising the subterranean hush of Bloomberg’s Mithraeum and the forested hush of Ise. The Wilsons’ use of low-frequency vibrations opens a dialogue with their architectural antecedents: the density of memory embedded in stone and cedar, the tremor between material and ritual.
Aesthetically, Performance of Entrapment continues the Wilsons’ tradition of forensic detail married to spectral narrative. 4K film gently exposes the patina of carved pillars, the grain of ceremonial wood, the textures of kimono. The LED curtain, with its micro-shifts in colour and rhythm, evokes both ancient torch-illumination and contemporary data transcendence. The artists here demonstrate again their ability to make digital projection feel as material as rusted metal or hewn rock.
This new work resonates powerfully with their earlier piece Suspended Island, especially in the way both works choreograph spatially layered narratives. Suspended Island physically projected across three geographically distinct sites, folded into one moving-image piece that treated location as metaphor. Similarly, Performance of Entrapment stages a choreography not just of two sacred spaces, but of time itself – archaeology and myth woven in mirrored counterpoints.
In choosing Bloomberg SPACE – located above the Mithraeum – and linking it with a 1400-year-old Japanese shrine, the Wilsons underscore the cosmopolitan reach of their enquiry into ritual space. Their theatrical use of mirrors and LED panels acts as architecture of reflection, inviting visitors to perceive their own position within these cultural palimpsests. The installation is as much about bringing the viewer into thematic orbit as showing them artifacts and dance. It materialises translation as embodied experience.
That this unfolds in the heart of London’s financial district rather than a museum is significant. It situates ritual – not as relic but as living practice – within networks of global commerce and exchange. Much like the Mithraic priests who once operated in the underworld of empire, the dancers at Ise are custodians of cyclical renewal, quietly restoring continuity unseen. The Wilsons make visible this dialogue of the sacred and the profane, the hidden and the perpetual.
Culminating their decades-long body of work that investigates institutional architecture and reclaimed sites – from Stasi headquarters to nuclear bunkers, airbases to parliament interiors – the Wilsons here exchange cold war ruin for shifting ritual landscapes. And yet the stakes remain the same: to reveal the sedimented layers of collective experience obscured beneath layers of gloss, bureaucracy and routine. Their work continues to haunt how structures preserve memory yet obscure transformation.
Performance of Entrapment at Bloomberg SPACE marks a mature, expansive turn for Jane & Louise Wilson. It brings archaeology, architecture and digital spectacle into a staging that feels both cerebral and visceral. Their film captures sisterhood across centuries, ritual across hemispheres, secrets across texts. In its mirror and veil, we confront our own enmeshment in structures that entrap as much as they liberate.
For audiences acquainted with their archive, this new commission reinforces the twin sisters as chroniclers of hidden geographies, articulators of spatial memory, translators of ritual and architecture. For newcomers, this immersive installation is a striking entrée into a world of doubled images, recast rituals, and the silent tension between what anchors us and what sets us free. As the LED light veils flicker and dancers circle on screen, we bear witness to an ongoing choreography between time, place, body and belief – and find ourselves within its reflection.
Performance of Entrapment is at London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE 17 July 2025 – January 2026: londonmithraeum.com
Words: Anna Müller
Image Credits:
All Images stills from Performance of Entrapment, 2025 © Jane and Louise Wilson.
