Cardiff and Miller
For their first major retrospective in an Italian institution in over two decades, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller will inhabit the Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca from April through July 2027. The exhibition will include monumental installations alongside more intimate contributions, including historical works and new pieces specifically conceived for the exhibition space. Sound environments and surprising interventions will engage visitors in a multisensory, personal, yet alienating encounter.
Known for pioneering complex multimedia installations, as well as their “audio and video walks,” Cardiff and Miller's practice challenges sensory experience, creating immersive environments in which sound guides vision and observation yields to auditory experience. Skillfully combining sound research, technological experimentation, and spatial awareness, the Canadian duo’s work unfolds into scenarios that are as ambiguous as seductive and emotionally charged.
These are environments that invite passage, contact, and listening. Cardiff and Miller’s installations lead the viewer into a distorted reality—suspended between real and virtual, material and spiritual—where perceptions of time and space blur. Intimate and dreamlike worlds, populated by stories and characters drawn from literature, theatrical fiction, and the collective memory of cinema, generate a fantastical dimension—a realm of speaking and listening—that offers a platform for exchange sparking dialogue with others and with one’s own past. An overlapping of personal memories and shared reminiscences emerged in their works, generating interference within the memory, encouraging visitors to reinterpret their own recollections.
The presentation is curated by Fiammetta Griccioli and Vicente Todolí.
For more information about the exhibition, please visit the Pirelli HangarBicocca website.