"Surround-Sound Art Finds a Perfect Home in Portugal" by Robert Barry

It’s a little after 10pm on a Saturday night and I’m standing in half a foot of water at the bottom of a medieval cistern in Coimbra in Portugal. I’m drinking a maple syrup mai tai and leaning against a makeshift tiki bar festooned with bamboo sticks and coloured lights. From a speaker on the side of the bar, Elvis is singing ‘Hawaiian Wedding Song’, his voice quavering around the high stone walls and vaulted ceiling, stretched by the echoes into phantom trails of vapour. There’s a hole in the roof like a ruined basketball net. A couple slowly dance, arm in arm, their rubber boots sploshing with each step. Reflections from the lights draw kaleidoscopic streaks in the water round my feet. Rarely has a work of art felt quite so much like stepping into another person’s dream.

The first time Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller showed their Blue Hawaii Bar it was in 2007 in Darmstadt. At the time, their exhibition at the German city’s Institut Mathildenhöhe was billed as the couple’s largest retrospective to date. But ‘The Factory of Shadows’, their present show at Coimbra’s monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova, may be an even more ambitious undertaking. Featuring some of the oldest works in their catalogue, from the early ’90s, right up to more recent installations such as The Instrument of Troubled Dreams from 2018, and including several rarely seen works, the exhibition spreads across the vast 13,000 square footage of the late 17th-century former nunnery.

Read full article at apollo-magazine.com.