Janet Cardiff

Still image of the location of the “Louisiana Walk“, 1996

Audio Excerpt: Louisiana Walk 9
Audio Excerpt: Louisiana Walk 35

Notes on the Artist

Janet Cardiff uses audio recordings as a tool to create an extreme awareness of the space. These site-specific pieces have audience members carry audio playback devices given to them by the gallery to then follow the same trail that Janet walked before. The recordings are almost always of Janet walking the same path that the viewer is walking and talking to herself and to the invisible audience member. Her thoughts, dreams, and previous recordings are the subjects of conversation and are specific to the site as the audio is recording the surroundings using stereo microphone equipment. The tours become a fully immersed navigational experience about the site’s presence with the artist and thus influencing the viewer’s own experience with the place.

Cardiff’s installations and walking pieces are often audio-based. She has been included in exhibitions such as: Present Tense, Nine Artists in the Nineties, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, NowHere, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, The Museum as Muse, Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie International ’99/00, the Tate Modern Opening Exhibition as well as a project commissioned by Artangel in London. This project (“The Missing Voice (Case Study B)”) was commissioned in 1999 and continues to run. It is an audio tour that leaves from the Whitechapel Library, next to the Whitechapel tube stop and snakes its way through London’s East End, weaving fictional narrative with descriptions about the actual landscape. Cardiff represented Canada at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1998, and at the 6th Istanbul Biennial in 1999 with her partner George Bures Miller.

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Importance to myself

Janet Cardiff has been a great inspiration to myself. She creates works that both have an active and passive element to them that ends up engaging the audience intimately. The audio walks like "Louisiana Walk", allows her to showcase the paradoxical sense of living "presently" while also experiencing "the past" simultaneously.