Trauma
2000
The work is displayed as part of the permanent exhibition
Audiovisual Media
Video installation
DVD, projection, colour, sound
duration 28΄42΄΄
Edition: 1/5 + 2 ΑP
Inv. No 105/01
Gillian Wearing (1963, Birmingham, England) has forged an artistic practice over the last thirty years in which, through photographs, videos, and sculptures, she examines the formation of identity. She examines the various rituals and gestures that people use to express their identity both privately and publicly. A primary attribute of her work is the element of mask, which she uses to transform herself into well-known public and/or historical figures, to portray herself or family members at different ages, and to enhance the confessions of people who want to keep their identities hidden.
Gillian Wearing’s work Trauma (2000) consists of confessional narrations of traumatic experiences made by people who have their faces covered with a plastic teenager mask. The video is presented in a room that resembles a confessional, linking these narrations to the Roman Catholic Christian tradition of managing emotions of guilt and self-victimisation. The mask allows the confessors to hide their identity while at the same time helping them inhabit themselves again at the age when the traumatic events of their narration took place. Through this ritual of confession, the narrators feel free to present a new face that has remained concealed even from their very selves.
Gillian Wearing was born in Birmingham. She lives and works in London. She studied at Chelsea School of Art (1987) and Goldsmiths College, University of London (1990). She was associated with the group of artists that emerged in the 1990s in England and became known as the Young British Artists. She has participated in hundreds of exhibitions all over the world. Solo exhibitions (selection): Festival Images Vevey, L’Appartement – Espace Images Vevey, Vevey (2022), PHOTO 2022: Being Human, International Festival of Photography, ACMI, Melbourne, Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, (2021), Moody Center for The Arts, Rice University, Houston (2019), Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati (2018), National Portrait Gallery, London, The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2017), ICA Boston (2016), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, IVAM, Valencia (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Cities in Flux, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Together in Time, Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Image of the Artist, Royal Academy of Arts, London, (2023), Tate Britain, London, Lenin Was a Mushroom, Moving Images in the 1990s, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Antwerp (2022), Sound and Silence, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Catastrophe and Recovery, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2021), Au Rendezvous des Amis, Pinatek der Moderne, Munich, Technology Transformation Kunstsammlung K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Alien vs. Citizen, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2020), Home Sweet Home, The Rencontres d’Arles, Maison des Peintres, Arles, France (2019). In 1997, she received the Turner Prize.