A Visit to Cardiff and Miller's "Paradise Institute"

Artists' Bio

Janet Cardiff
Born in Brussels, Ontario, Canada, 1957

George Bures Miller
Born in Vegreville, Alberta, Canada, 1960

Both live and work in Berlin, Germany, and Grindrod, British Columbia, Canada

Recent Major Exhibitions Include

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995–2007, Museu d’Art
Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain, and Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Germany (2007).
Traveling to Miami Art Museum (fall 2007).

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebæk, Denmark (2006)

The Paradise Institute, which focuses on the language and experience of cinema, was originally produced for
the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

For more information on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, please visit www.cardiffmiller.com

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Read excerpts from the AI Interview with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller:

Janet, George, I’m fascinated by how you intertwine reality and illusion in your work. Your installation The Paradise Institute (2001), for example, looks like a couple of packing cases from the outside, but once you go inside and put the headphones on, you’re in an old-fashioned cinema.

Janet Cardiff: George often calls it a “cinema-simulator”...

George Bures Miller: It’s the full cinema experience: the audience around you, the friend beside you...

...the plush seats. And then you’re transported.

Except you’re constantly tripping the simulation up.

Yeah, exactly. We’re fascinated by pulling the rug out from under the viewer. We create a reality within a piece, like the model cinema in The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), but then at one point it appears as if the film is breaking, so the viewer has to think about the technology of the piece. They realize that they’re not inside the story anymore and think, “Oh, I’m viewing an installation piece.”

You offer them illusions that they don’t necessarily understand but can discover.

Everyone experiences the piece in different ways. We try to put multiple layers in there to allow that. We definitely try to get to the third or fourth reality, but I’m not sure that every viewer gets there.

For the full interview, click here

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