TRENTO, ITALY.- Which are the characteristics of our contemporary family? How many members does it have? How do they live? What are they longing for and how are they planning their future? And most of all, how can art, always ready to get in touch with the most debated aspects of our society’s evolution enter now in a relationship with such a varied and variegated entity? Here is the theme faced by the British artist Gillian Wearing who from March 24 to June 10, 2007, at the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento, dedicates with her first one-woman show at an Italian public institution, a specific and unpublished project to this secular institution, Family Monument.

The work in progress will involve for several months the exhibiting space of the gallery and our territorial reality. It aims to choose the Trentino family to whom a monument will be dedicated. It will be developed through a series of suggested candidacies through the regional press by exploiting, for the selection, also television video-documents.

It will not focus on revisiting of the usual “reality show” formula, but it will be an actual artwork, a research project by which the articulated variety of contemporary families is observed and valued, both in its demographic components and in the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, to look for and finally elect the “typical family” of our time.

The selected ones will be portrayed in a bronze monument erected in a public space in town. Gillian Wearing proposes an empirical selection method, departing from existing cases (family nuclei) to reach a winning family to represent a specific community (precisely, the Trento community). Here is, then, the final monument, conceived to last forever in order to reveal the irony and at the same time the underlying melancholy on which the whole project resides, while the charged symbolism that usually invests the represented subject fades behind the difficulty of giving form to an entity as dynamic and complex as the contemporary family.

Within the spaces of the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento and for the entire length of the project, the work in progress will be recorded. The monument to make the winning family immortal, created by the artist in a classical material, bronze, will require a longer time and will be officially shown in September 2007.

Along with the project the 18th issue of “Work. Art in progress” will dedicate a wide space to the artist and to her work.

Born in Birmingham (Great Britain) in 1963, Gillian Wearing lives and works in London Her activities are in the field of anthropology, media specifically video, photography and television through which she unmasks the stereotypes linked to the human condition by exploring its complexities, by revealing its traumas and emotions, and by touching on themes like identity and self representation.

In 1992, for example, the artist ideated Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say, in which she stopped people in the streets and asked them to write a sentence, whatever came to their minds at the moment on a piece of paper, then took their pictures. Sometimes there was a strong contrast in-between how the person appeared and what he or she was thinking, like the businessman soberly and elegantly dressed, who chose to write “I’m desperate”. In other cases, the sentence was of an unsettling innocence, like the one of the little old lady met in a public park who candidly stated “I love Regent’s Park”.

In 1993, with Take Your Top Off, Gillian Wearing put her own self into play, she was photographed in bed with transsexuals she had just met. In 1996, with Sixty minute silence, she involved a few dozen men and women dressed in police uniforms in a video, she had them pose for 60 minutes in a sort of group portrait. Projected onto a wall, the work dominated an entire room of the Tate Gallery, the subjects, initially immobile, made the image rather similar to a photograph. As a matter of fact and with the passing of time, the spectators started noticing imperceptible movements that betrayed the true nature of the artwork: a sort of test of endurance, that reduced to captivity traditional authority represented as it was by the uniforms and that stood as a comment to the ephemeral nature of social power. In Confess All On Video. Don’t worry You Will Be in Diguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian however, the artist collects awkward confessions of masked people, that precisely thanks to this device feel free to confess the most shameful or absurd things of their past or present lives. Even the theme of the family, the true heart of the project in Trento, recalls other artworks by the artist, for example with Sasha and Mum, from 1996, in which the artist shows an aggression taking place in a home, by the use of actors and looped audio-video clips, to explore the subtle limits between love and hate, care and oppression, protection and control. On the other hand, in 2 into 1, dated 1997, Gillian Wearing stages one of her identity shifts through a mother and two children that exchange voice and ideas, succeeding thus in better entwining and understanding both themselves and one another. This sort of interaction/exchange continues also in Album, 2003, in which the artist puts on masks depicting the closest representatives of her own family, thus trying out in first person the experience of identification with them. Finally, in 2006, the artist created Family History, a remake of The Family, a production halfway between fiction and a documentary, produced by the BBC in the seventies, centered on the theme of the family.

In 2006 the artist was present at the Fourth Biannual of Berlin; in 2004 in Manifesta 5, San Sebastian and in the Busan Biannual of Seoul, Korea; in 2002 in the Sao Paulo Biannual, Brazil; in 2001 in the Lione Biannual; in 1999 in the Istanbul Biannual; in 1995 in Campo, Biennale of Venice. In 1997 the artist was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize.