JANET CARDIFF & GEORGE BURES MILLER
The Killing Machine and other Stories
Exhibition dates: from 2 February to 1 May 2007
Opening: Thursday, February 1, 2007, 7.30 p.m.
Coproduced by: Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt
Curated by: Bartomeu Marí (Chief Curator of MACBA)
MACBA, Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona
Plaça dels Angels, 1
08001 Barcelona
Spain
Since the early nineties Janet Cardiff (Brussels, Ontario, Canada, 1957) and George Bures Miller (Vegreville, Canada, 1960) have been working together on works in which they use sound and voice as raw material and main subject. Through techniques of edition and reproduction of binaural sound and the use of earphones and loudspeaker systems these works can be characterised as authentic sound sculptures.
These installations become temporal units of experience, in narrations that combine fictional stories and sound effects and question the visitors sensory experience, opposing the sense of hearing with the sense of sight. The sculptural space is therefore transformed into a phantasmagorical or hallucinatory one where apparently contradictory cultural traditions coincide at a specific place and time. The spectator is looking at works that are difficult to classify, since they propose a collage that brings together forms of high culture such as opera, art films or literature with popular culture, B-movies, rocknroll or radio broadcasts.
This exhibition contains a total of ten installations that weave a fabric of independent but complementary experiences. Each work imposes a time and a rhythm of its own, and like a play is linked to the imaginative capacity of each individual, which gives rise to a host of readings. This very high reading visuality brings Cardiff and Millers work close to literature by generating a script which can be read or interpreted according to the eye or ear of each reader-spectator. This produces stories that live side by side in time and transport the visitor to superimposed fictions: of the museum and of the works.
Among the Solo Exhibitions of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller in recent years are: the Lousiana Museum and the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2006; the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington) and the Kunsthaus Bregenz, in 2005; the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in 2004; the Whitechapel Art Gallery de Londres and the Museum of Modern Art of Oslo, in 2003; The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the L.Augustine Gallery of New York and the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) in 2002; the Canadian Pavillion in the 49 Biennale Venice, the Ps.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the Musée dArt Contemporain de Montréal and the Castello di Rivoli (Torino) in
2001.
