Janet Cardiff

Janet Cardiff

(Born 1957, works in Grindrod, British Columbia)

Wanås Walk, 1998

Audio walk, MP3 player, 13 mins

Janet Cardiff participated in the Wanås exhibition in 1998, and her audio work Wanås Walk is available on loan as a portable MP3 player at the Art Gallery entrance. Listen to the artist’s voice, keep pace with her and join her on a walk along a winding path through the park. With recorded ambient sounds, real observations, and fictive narratives, Cardiff charges the place with mystery and drama. It gradually becomes harder to discern whether then birdsong, footsteps, and horse whinnies originate from the surroundings or if they exist only in Cardiff’s recording made on site in 1998. Wanås Walk highlights the way our hearing influences what we expect to see. With a sense of enchantment, the listener experiences how the things Cardiff mentions coincide with actual occurrences during the walk. Cardiff has created audio walks since 1991 in Florence, London and New York to mention a few cities, and for art institutions such as MoMA PS1, NY, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.