Artists break the walls of silence to uncover Dubai murder mystery and Chernobyl ruins

IN AN afternoon with the artists Jane and Louise Wilson I learn quite a lot about doors. Sometimes you need permission to open them. Sometimes they are best opened with guile. Sometimes they turn out to be wide open already: you just haven’t noticed it yet.

My first lesson is practical: I have spent 15 minutes panicking outside the East London studio that the twin sisters share, when finally I discover that the intimidating security door of the former printworks has been unlocked the whole time.

The second lesson, when we retire to a café in nearby Broadway Market, is both literal and metaphorical. The sisters, who have just celebrated their 45th birthday, are pleasant and businesslike. But make no mistake, professionally they can be hard as nails when they need to be and they have used this determination to turn opening doors itself into an art form.

Last year, when they were refused permission to film within the Dubai hotel where the Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was assassinated in January 2010, it occurred to them they could solve the problem more directly. A member of their crew simply booked a night in the room.

Did they think they were taking a risk defying the Dubai authorities? “Yes,” they cry in unison. Although quite what might have happened if they were caught they didn’t know. “We decided we just had to do it, we needed to go covert,” says Louise,.

“It was a case of ‘come on let’s.’ ” agrees Jane.

They armed themselves with the most basic kit, nothing fancier than a tripod, and the cover story that they were just on their way back from filming elsewhere in Dubai and were stopping over for the last night on their way to the airport. To minimise the risk of being discovered they worked in the hours of darkness. “We spent the whole night filming and, of course, waiting to be disturbed, but it didn’t happen,” says Louise. “We left at about five in the morning. We didn’t hang around for breakfast.”

With a CV that includes filming inside the emptied silos at the Greenham Common Air Base, investigating the ominous abandoned Stasi headquarters in East Berlin and gaining rare permission to film inside the Houses of Parliament, the pair are used to opening the door to unseen or hidden places.

Their latest show, which opens on Saturday at Dundee Contemporary Arts, is the UK premiere of their Dubai film Face Scripting, What Did The Building See? but it has also seen them travel inside the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to photograph the abandoned city of Pripyat on the 25th anniversary of the nuclear disaster.

When the Wilsons arrived on their first visit to Kiev in the heat of August 2010, the city felt under threat. Forest fires were sweeping towards the Ukrainian capital; what they had mistaken for industrial smog was in fact the smoke blowing into the city. In contrast, their journey to Chernobyl, two and half hours away, felt like an escape into nature, with clear skies and lush countryside. “It’s overgrown, nature has completely taken over,” explains Jane. “In high summer it was like being in the Amazonian jungle.”

They stayed in what was described as a hotel, but in reality was kind of pre-fab used by visiting film crews. They couldn’t eat local produce or drink the water. No-one under 18 is allowed in the zone.

On their second visit, they had a “Chernobyl veteran” who, as a young conscript, had cleared the villages of the exclusion zone, moving people who had lived there for five or six generations. “The trauma was also the fact that you couldn’t see the physical manifestation of an enemy or a threat because radiation was absolutely invisible. There was nothing. Everything looked perfectly healthy.”

The Wilsons’ lush photographs in Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum) show the abandoned public spaces of Pripyat – its cinema, the empty kindergarten with its beds and books and toys. What looks like the impact of fire or explosion is the impact of 25 years of abandonment and the continued treatment of the area with water.

They stayed for a week, assured that in that timescale their radiation exposure would be no more than that occurring on a transatlantic flight. Jane describes her bewilderment among the ruins, where nature has taken over: “There is no crime scene, no evidential thing to help you rationalise what happened.”

If the story of Chernobyl was, as Jane puts it, “devastation, utter devastation and horror,” what happened behind the door of room 230 of the five-star al-Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai might have been a classic locked room mystery, and was a story irresistible to artists long interested in the all-seeing eye of the camera.

On 19 January, 2010, Mahmoud Al-Mahbouh was found dead, apparently from natural causes. The door was locked and there was no evidence of a struggle. Within hours, however, security camera footage of the hotel corridor revealed there was more to this death than first appeared.

Within weeks the Dubai State Police had released a state-of-the-art video: they had CCTV images of virtually every move in Dubai of both the victim and the crack team of assassins. One thing was missing though – what happened in the room itself.

“The door was locked from the inside,” says Louise, “They had been following him for some time, he was injected in his thigh with a muscle relaxing agent that disabled him, and I think he was subsequently suffocated.”

The sisters both describe the event as “chilling”. Their Face Scripting film is neither quite a reconstruction of events nor a fictional account, instead it is a meditation on surveillance culture, what the electronic eye can and can’t see, on the weird situation that now even the world’s most sophisticated spies can’t do their business without being spied upon.

The room had no particular atmosphere, they say, it was banal, apparently unchanged, a standard room on the second floor overlooking the tennis court. There was no balcony. I ask them if this kind of subject matter makes them paranoid. They both roar with laughter. “There’s clearly something about measuring, quantifying, analysing it, psychologically that’s in our nature,” Jane says.

Louise is almost gleeful: “The need to quantify: it’s intelligence gathering, it is so immensely satisfying.” Did they personally get spooked? “It is definitely chilling looking through the lens,” says Jane. “Listening to the sounds. The CCTV footage is silent.”

There is a familial resemblance between the sisters, but not much more. The Wilsons, who were nominated for the Turner Prize back in 1999, wear the familiar uniform of professionals of their age, black sweater, dark coats and narrow jeans. They each live separately within easy distance of their studio, Jane with her husband and young son. They refer to each other as “sis” and hand the conversation over like passing a baton.

“In a collaborative practice there has to be such an element of trust,” says Louise. “In the sibling relationship that we have, let alone being twins, there is so much trust and so much familiarity.”

Famously, Jane, who was at Newcastle Polytechnic, and Louise, who was at Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, submitted identical degree shows. They then moved to London’s Kings Cross and studied together at Goldsmiths, the crucible of the BritArt scene, where their crummy bedsit became their first studio and they often featured in their own work. Lots of artists lived in the area, but it was also full of drug addicts and kerb-crawlers.

“We documented our flat, staged a scene of the crime,” says Jane. “We then moved into a local B&B and took our things round there and literally poured our stuff into it, and took it away with us again in the morning, so we have had an encounter like this [Dubai] before.”

Louise is keen to attribute their ideas to the general atmosphere of the early 1990s when notions of alienation were in the air everywhere: “If you talk about alienation, we grew up listening to Joy Division and The Smiths. Our generation did it like nobody’s business.”

“Having said that,” says Jane, “the precursor for a lot of those images was getting the front door smashed in.” Ah, a door again; I make a note in my book. “That was a real event…” says Jane. “So, it became an artwork,” says Louise. «

• Jane and Louise Wilson is at Dundee Contemporary Arts from Saturday until 25 March