Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Since the early 1990s, Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have explored how sound influences and shapes our experience of the outside world. They have shifted their focus from art as a primarily visual experience — that is, art as a tangible object to look at — to art as an experience for several senses at the same time.

The duo's most comprehensive sound installation to date, The Murder of Crows (2008), is now presented for the first time in Sweden. With the help of 98 speakers, the work seems to move around the audience to the same degree as the audience itself moves through it.

The work relates to the strong presence war and torture have gained in popular culture and mass media since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. It is inspired by Goya's etching When reason sleeps, monsters are created from the series Los Caprichos (c. 1799). This etching is thought to picture Goya himself asleep with his head and arms leaning against a table, in the dream surrounded by winged marvels.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are based in Grindrod in British Columbia in Canada and in Berlin, Germany. They have exhibited individually or together at, for example, Documenta 13, Kassel; MoMA, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; MACBA, Barcelona; Wanås Konst, Knislinge; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek. They represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale and were awarded the La Biennale di Venezia Special Prize.

The Murder of Crows is produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for the 2008 Sydney Biennale.

^{Photo: Johann Bergenholtz}