Space installation work containing a machine consisting of a dentist's chair, black and white television sets, robotics, pneumatics, a guitar as well as a computer. A moving megaphone speaker encircles an electric dental chair. The chair is covered in pink fun fur with leather straps and spikes. In the installation are two robotic arms that hover and move- sometimes like a ballet, and sometimes attacking the invisible prisoner in the chair with pneumonic pistons. A disco ball turns above the mechanism reflecting an array of coloured lights while a guitar hit by a robotic wand wails and a wall of old TV’s turns on and off creating an eerie glow. Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller, Sammlung Goetz Munich

Haus der Kunst, Munich

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Works from the Goetz Collection

April 12 – July 7, 2012

With eight works spanning the best part of a decade, from Playhouse (1997) and The Paradise Institute (2001) to Cabin Fever (2004) and The Killing Machine (2007), the complex oeuvre of Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller form a core element of the Goetz Collection’s more than 500 media artworks.

In close collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz and the artists, Haus der Kunst presents this important collection in the form of a retrospective solo exhibition hosted in the museum’s south wing under the curatorial guidance of León Krempel. Compelling visual images, richly ambiguous narratives and intense sound structures combine to create open-ended, multi-layered sensory experiences that jolt our sensibilities from their often simplistic one-sidedness. The works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller make us aware that there is often more to the things, objects and processes of everyday life than the purely functional.

Curated by León Krempel