Artipedia - Arts News

The Fruitmarket Gallery

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Dark Pool, 1995
Courtesy Barbara Weiss, Luhring Augustine Gallery and the artists

Janet Cardiff
and George Bures Miller
The House Of Books Has No Windows

Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition
31 July - 28 September 2008

Organised in collaboration
with Modern Art Oxford

The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street
Edinburgh
EH1 1DF
P +44 (0) 131 225 2383
F +44 (0) 131 220 3130
info@fruitmarket.co.uk
http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk

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 its 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

tranzitdisplay

Jan Mancuska:
Southwest pillar and its shadow at the beginning of the novel; in tranzitdisplay, Prague

Ján Mančuška:
Southwest pillar and its shadow
at the beginning of the novel
24.6.-14.9.2008

tranzitdisplay
Resource centre
for contemporrary art
Ditrichova 9
Praha 2
Czech Republic
http://www.tranzitdisplay.cz

Descend the long staircase; the first piece, a long aluminium pole inscribed with a text, is found on the landing approximately halfway down the staircase as it makes a ninety-degree turn to the left. The pole leans against a wall that you see as you walk onto the staircase.

As you walk down the stairs and stand on the landing dominated by an Art Deco lamp, two views of the space open up to you. A fast, electronic, inhumanly rapid film montage of a naked woman descending a staircase. A young lady with short, probably bleached, blonde hair, holds her back as stiff as a board and she walks down the stairs. We see this film image from the base of the stairs to the right of the central column. If we look to the left, we see ourselves in a long and tall mirror reaching from the floor nearly to the ceiling. The dimensions of the mirror are approximately 5.5 m x 3 m. Approach the mirror; to your right, crossways to the corner of the room, is a black curtain in the shape of the letter U hanging from the ceiling. A film is playing on the space inside the letter U: a view of a landscape, a shot of a meadow, perhaps in a park. All at once the view begins to recede, disappearing inside, and we realize that we saw the view of the meadow in the mirror.

We move on along the mirror: to the left are four small projections – extremely long shots that are static in the short-term, but upon longer viewing shadows move on the ceiling, clouds pass across the sky. These are views of a civil still life – the ceiling of a room, walls, street walls, the fronts of houses.

Two of Mančuška’s familiar installations are in the next room – a film of a performance in which a girl is blackening the parts of her partner’s body he cannot see and a text installation first exhibited two years ago at the Berlin Biennial.

A recording of a visit to the Ján Mančuška exhibition after two weeks, by heart. The exhibition is Mančuška’s first solo show in the country in five years.

Enter,
That which appears…
(Text, aluminium, 2005)

descend the stairs and turn 180° degrees,

Motión Picture (Nude Descending a Staircase)
(Video, architectural space, 2007; Dimensions variable)

turn and take about three steps forward,

From A to B and Back Again
(Video, spatial installation, 2008; Dimensions variable)

move to the left, an image of yourself is to the right;

Big Mirror
(mirror, 3×6m, 2008)

continue straight on, don’t hit the wall,

30 Minutes Photograph
(A series of 3 videos, spatial installation, 2008; Dimensions variable)

walk through the small corridor to the right, toward the light,

The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all the parts of my body which I cannot see.)
(35mm films, light boxes, 2007; Photographic cooperation Martin Polák)

continue on until you reach the black curtain – draw it aside,

20 Minutes After
(Light, aluminium letters in the space, marker handwriting, 2006)

it´s the end, but you can go around once more.

All the artworks:
Courtesy of Andrew Kreps Gallery New York, Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe

tranzitdisplay, a centre for contemporary art, is a synergetic project of the tranzit initiative and the Display Gallery. The facility opened in November 2007.
Exhibitions: Eric Beltrán, All Dressed-Up With Nowhere To Go (WHW), Laboratory, Spoken Word (M.Copeland), E.-L. Ahtila (M. Stjernstedt, H. Holmberg), changing permanent installation of Monument to Transformation, lectures, bookstore, archive, drinks. www.tranzitdisplay.cz

The main partner of tranzitdisplay is Česká spořitelna, a.s., Erste Group.
Additional support is provided by the Czech Ministry of Culture, Prague City Hall, and the Prague 2 City District.
Media partners are the A2 cultural weekly, E15, Flash Art, and Radio 1.

Thanks to the Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe.