Turner Prize winning artist Gillian Wearing explored people’s inner thoughts with her iconic ‘Signs That Say…’ work in 1994. The Whitechapel Gallery were doing a retrospective of her work and wanted a campaign that would help today’s audience engage with the work. Facebook is a platform where we curate our lives but often only post the best things that happen to us. What if there was a way to dig deeper and use the platform to expose our true inner thoughts?
We looked to explore these themes with a social media campaign that delved beyond the superficial status of updates and likes. People were encouraged to upload what they were really thinking via a Facebook app in either photo or status update format. These were then collated on the Whitechapel Facebook page and fed through to the Gillian Wearing exhibition page. The activity culminated in a takeover of the Guardian Culture section where Wearing chose her favourite photos.
