Cardiff & Miller at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Over the past two decades, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have developed an impressive series of collaborative pieces that combine image, video and sound, as well as architectural and sculptural installations.

Sound and a special binaural recording and playback technology are key components in their installations, producing an excessive spatial audio and sensory feeling. Their work evokes thoughts and associations that become inextricably interwoven with personal experiences, thus creating a constantly changing new fiction.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Millers work has been shown at such major international exhibition venues as P.S.1 in New York, the Musée dArt Contemporain Montreal, the Castello Rivoli in Turin, the Portikus Frankfurt and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

For the Kunsthaus Bregenz exhibition, running from Nov. 26 through Jan. 15, 2006, Cardiff & Miller have created three new works (Pianorama, The Secret Hotel and Opera for a Small Room) which can be seen in part as a direct reference to or an intervention in the architecture designed by Peter Zumthor. Their award-winning contribution to the Venice Biennial 2001, The Paradise Institute, is also being shown in Bregenz.

In Pianorama, on view on the museums ground floor, an old-fashioned upright piano is positioned in the middle of the space. There are two small loudspeakers facing the keyboard. A mechanical device called a Playola, which plays the piano, sits on top of the keys. Out of one loudspeaker comes Janets voice and out of the other comes Georges. These voices are discussing what type of music might be appropriate for what seems to be a film they are planning. The keys being moved by the mechanical solenoids attached above them respond to their voices, which produces an overall eerie effect.

In The Secret Hotel, viewers enter a room with a low ceiling and notice a wooden staircase leading up that is lined with wallpaper reminiscent of an old American hotel. When they reach the top, they arrive at a walkway above the frosted-glass ceiling panels. Strange noises like that of an old industrial building mingle around. Viewers then come upon an opening in the glass with a very small room at its bottom far below. Their spatial understanding is confused since they know that it is not possible to have a room there. A bed, a chair and a record player are the only things in this small room. From the record player comes the sound of a forgotten record which has got stuck.




Photos Courtesy of Kunsthaus Bregenz, © Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, KUB. Images (top to bottom): Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2002, Photo by Jens Ziehe,?Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin; Photo by Markus Tretter.