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52 Mark Wallinger b. 1959 Mark Wallinger was born in Chigwell and works in London. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and he won the Turner Prize in 2007 for his installation State Britain. His sculpture Ecce Homo (1999) was the first work to occupy the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. His work is displayed in the collections of many leading international museums including Tate Modern; Museum of Modern Art, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Wallinger's work poses important questions about our identity, and about the social, cultural and political power structures that shape and define us. Threshold to the Kingdom is a video comprised of slowed footage of people arriving at London's City Airport. About the work, Wallinger comments, "In negotiating the more or less authoritarian or coercive apparatus of the state which define and control one's progress from 'air-side' to land- side', one is perhaps reminded of a kind of secular equivalent of the progression from confession to absolution. Eventually, all that separates us from the no-man's-land and the official terra firma of the state are a pair of automatic doors." While earlier works such as Angel explored the rich symbolism available in negotiating our way around the city, this film plays with the symbolism that signals a change in state. The aura of security, the self-consciousness this induces and the little drama of the final gates opening onto the United Kingdom are amplified and transformed by the soundtrack into an altered state or delivery into the Kingdom of Heaven itself. The soundtrack to the video, Allegri's Miserere, is a setting of the fifty-first psalm, which has been sung in the Sistine Chapel for centuries and the music was a closely guarded secret until Mozart, visiting as a fourteen-year-old, made a notation from memory. Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000 Video projection, audio 11 minutes 20 seconds Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth ©Mark Wallinger www.hauserwirth.com In Threshold to the Kingdom we are made to think about our understanding of heaven, and in this case, the nature of death as a departure. If death is about departure and arrival in heaven what might it mean to be met by God?