The sea and theatres of Margate have inspired two films being shown in the town, made by leading artists Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers

Art lovers are having their curiosity tempted by a new cinema which has popped up next to the Turner Contemporary.

Sinema Amnesia will be showing a new film by artist Mark Wallinger, best known in Kent for his design of the White Horse, a 160-foot sculpture planned alongside the A2 near Bluewater.

Overlooking the sea behind the Turner Contemporary, the cinema will be showing the film The Waste Land. It plays back a recorded image taken 24 hours earlier from a camera looking out to sea from Margate.

The rolling movie is designed to show an endless picture of unfolding time. It is inspired by TS Eliot’s poem of the same name, which was partially written on Margate Sands and explores what the gallery’s promotional literature calls “the disconnected time of modernity”. This time machine aims to call memory and perception into question.

Running concurrently with Wallinger’s film will be another movie by London artist Lindsay Seers. Her piece, Entangled², takes audiences to a secret place within the Turner Contemporary, which visitors must ask for when they arrive at the desk.

It captures a pair of actresses dressed as men on the stages of Margate’s two great venues, the Theatre Royal and the Winter Gardens. Both have hosted scores of famous performers and Seers’ piece is inspired by two male impersonators from early 20th century music hall, Hettie King and Vesta Tilley.

The film sweeps visitors into a saucy seaside past where the boundaries between people blur. As in all Seers’ work, the artist has fitted in some personal narrative. The actresses’ doubled identities connect to Seers’s fascination with her great-great uncle’s condition heterochromia, where different coloured eyes result from one twin subsuming the other in the womb.

Turner Contemporary director Victoria Pomery said: “We are thrilled to be working with Mark and Lindsay on two exciting commissions.

“Prior to the opening of the gallery we had to be inventive in our use of spaces and these commissions follow in that vein.”

The two pieces have been created with the help of students from the University for the Creative Arts. Vice-chancellor Simon Ofield-Kerr said: “We commissioned these works so that our students and staff could benefit from the experience of working closely with Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers.

“We are thrilled by the works that have been produced and hope the people of Kent find them interesting and stimulating.”

Mark Wallinger’s Sinema Amnesia and Lindsay Seers’s Entangled² are both free and run from Saturday, July 7 to Sunday, August 5. They are open Tuesday to Sunday, with entry to Sinema Amnesia during gallery opening hours (10am to 6pm) and performances of Entangled² on the hour throughout the day (11am to 4pm). Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers will be in conversation with Simon Ofield-Kerr, vice chancellor of University for the Creative Arts, at 3pm on Saturday, July 7. Tickets £5, concessions £4. Call 01843 233000.