Janet Cardiff

Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller

Her Long Black Hair, 2004

Janet Cardiff was born in 1957 in Brusself, Ontario. She studied at Queen's University and the University of Alberta. Currently she lives with in Berlin along with her friend and collaborator George Bures Miller. Her works tend to be installations, usually with audio involved.


She has been included in many exhibitions all over the world, including Scotland, England, New York, and Canada and represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale with Bures Miller.

Ship of Fools, 2010

Some of their work includes walks, where they tour people around a city or a building with headphones and photographs. One example is 'Her Long Black Hair', where people carry photographs of a woman going to the same places around Central Park in New York. The walk is roughly 40 minutes long. Their most recent walk was in 2006 where visitors were taken on a walk through a landscape where the battle between the Prussians and Napolean took place over 200 years ago. The audio includes excerpts from Louise Seidler's journal, the painter of Goethe from Jena. The audio includes sound effects of battle scenes.

Telephone/Time, 2004

Cardiff and Bures Miller recently salvaged a thirty-foot Chinese junk boat. They took it to their studio and recreated the the interior. Viewers enter the cabin and discover many pointless contraptions, like a "underground workshop for nonsense". These contraption represent the people that ran the boat captionless - therefore pointlessly and without direction. It takes roughly six minutes to go through the installation.

Smaller works they have done together include one called Telephone. The visitor listens to a conversation on an old-fashioned phone. What they hear is a recorded dialogue between Cardiff and a scientist discussing space and time. It loops every two minutes.