Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
dal 30/7/2008 al 27/9/2008
Segnalato da
30/7/2008
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
The House Of Books Has No Windows. Their collaborative installations are multi-layered, multi-media experiences. Using objects, images and sound, they collage together impressions and experiences, memory and history, mixing references to high and popular culture in works which draw an audience into a series of intensely credible fictional worlds.
A rare chance to experience the work of one of the most internationally respected artist
partnerships, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Cardiff/Miller’s collaborative
installations are multi-layered, multi-media experiences. Using objects, images and sound,
they collage together impressions and experiences, memory and history, mixing
references to high and popular culture in works which draw an audience into a series of
intensely credible fictional worlds.
Canadian artists Cardiff and Miller have been at the forefront of international
attention since The Paradise Institute won a special jury prize at the 2001
Venice Biennale. This exhibition brings together six installations, made
between 1995 and 2008, and includes a specially commissioned new work.
The six installations in the exhibition entice the viewer into six new worlds,
each using whatever means it needs to transport us somewhere else. In one
room, we peer into a mini cinema, screening a five-minute mid-western film
noir. As we watch, we become part both of the film and the audience,
phantom fellow cinema-goers whispering in our ears. Opening an old door
into another room, we think we must have strayed into the artists’ studio: a
room stuffed with books, record players, speakers, models, notes, drawings and peculiar mechanical
devices, all of which start to tell us stories as we wander amongst them, triggering snippets of sound
as we go.
Two recent works form the spectacular highlight of the exhibition. Opera for a Small Room (2005) is
an installation of 2,000 records, eight robotically-controlled record players and 24 speakers. In a 20-
minute, automated performance which collages together arias from Italian operas; rock music; a
recording of a stage hypnotist from the 1970s; the sound of rain and a train; and the lonely musings
of an opera-lover alone in his room in the middle of nowhere, the piece mesmerises us, as much a
piece of theatre as an installation. The Killing Machine (2007) is a darker, bleaker piece, a robotic
machine inspired partly by the artists’ hatred of the American system of capital punishment, and
partly by Franz Kafka’s chilling short story In The Penal Colony.
Cardiff/Miller’s work has never before been seen in Scotland, and rarely in Great Britain. Original,
imaginative and performative, it is a coup for The Fruitmarket Gallery and a treat for it’s audiences.
Notes to editors
1. Janet Cardiff was born in 1957, Brussels, Ontario, Canada and George Bures Miller in 1960, Vegreville, Alberta, Canada. They both live
and work in Berlin, Germany, and Grindrod, British Columbia, Canada.
2. Cardiff/Miller are presenting Murder of Crows, a new multi-media audio installation at the 16th Sydney Biennale, Australia - 18 June – 7
September 2008. In 2007 The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995–2007 was presented at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
(MACBA), Barcelona, Spain, and Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Germany and MAM Miami Art Museum, Miami, USA.
3. There will be a two-volume publication produced to accompany the exhibition, which will act both as a catalogue to the exhibition
and a compendium of notes and drawings for as yet unrealised works. With one volume containing texts on and images of the works
exhibited, and the other bringing together sketches, drawings, notes and ideas for works that either may or may not one day be made,
the publication offers a range of routes in to the Cardiff/Miller imagination.
4. This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Modern Art Oxford and will be shown at Modern Art Oxford
from 14 October 2008 – 18 January 2009
5. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller will be in conversation at The Fuitmarket Gallery on Friday 1 August 2008 at 6pm.
This event is free but booking is essential, P 0131 226 8181 E bookshop@fruitmarket.co.uk
Organised in collaboration with Modern Art Oxford
The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street - Edinburgh
Mon—Sat 11am—6pm, Sun 12—5pm
Free admission