Installation views | Cardiff & Miller

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale.

Press preview:

Tuesday, 6 june 2023, 10:30 am

Opening:

Tuesday, 6 june 2023, 6:30 pm

7 June – 24 September 2023

The Canadian artist duo #janetcardiff (b. 1957) and #georgeburesmiller (b. 1960) create installations that activate all the senses. Museum Tinguely's #dreammachines exhibition is the first #show in Switzerland to present a wide-ranging overview of the duo's work, from their first interactive soundscapes to their most recent immersive – and dystopian – spatial installations. Their works are homages to cultural practices steeped in tradition such as cinema, theatre and live music-making. Those ready to encounter these intricate, mixed-media works in situ between 7 June and 24 September 2023 are in for a deep dive into worlds full of dreams and poetry. As of 1 July 2023 the exhibition will be flanked by an extra muros installation in the Druckereihalle Ackermannshof in Basel.

The artist duo launched their now over thirty-year-long career with binaural, on-site, walkman cassette ‘audiowalks’ before turning to CD’s and since 2000 using various video devices creating a simple form of augmented reality. These perambulatory works have been described as a type of interactive physical cinema. Like our sense of smell, our acoustic memory is an accurate, high-capacity storage and retrieval system, which influences our perception and which in its openness, corporeality, and associative capacity might even be superior to our visual memory. The artists take full advantage of the auditory creating a wonderfully unbounded, open-ended walk that interacts with the physical surroundings heightening all the senses but at the same time seems very much like a meditative trance.

Cardiff and Miller have used various technical approaches to sound. Their first major musical installation, The Forty Part Motet (2001), pioneered the use of separate audio tracks, recording the voices of 40 individual singers, which were played back in unison. This work developed out of a famous piece of sacred choral music, Thomas Tallis’s motet Spem in Alium (around 1570) scored for eight five-part choirs. The forty loudspeakers are arranged in an oval, each speaker an individual singer, simulating a virtual choir where the movement of the voices around the space creates an almost physical sculptural experience. Visitors can deconstruct the composition by moving around the room, tuning into individual voices, or experiencing the totality of the composition.

- Fotogallery (14)