Janet Cardiff is perhaps best known for her signature audio walks, which she has made in London, Florence, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis, and elsewhere. Her gallery installations–often made with George Bures Miller, Cardiff’s husband and artistic collaborator–use the narrative and technical language of film noir to create lush, suspenseful sound and video works. Janet Cardiff was born in Canada in 1957; she and Miller currently live and work in Berlin. They have recently had exhibitions at Luhring Augustine, New York (2004); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2003); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2002); and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2002). A recent mid-career retrospective, Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller, opened at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens, in 2001 and has since traveled to Montreal, Oslo, and Turin.
Her Long Black Hair
Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair is a 35-minute journey that begins at Central Park South and transforms an everyday stroll in the park into an absorbing psychological experience. Cardiff (b.1957, Brussels, Canada) takes each listener on a winding journey through Central Park’s 19th-century pathways, retracing the footsteps of an enigmatic dark-haired woman. Relayed in a quasi-narrative style, Her Long Black Hair is a complex investigation of location, time, sound, and physicality, interweaving stream-of-consciousness observations with fact and fiction, local history, opera and gospel music, and other atmospheric and cultural elements.
The experience of the walk uses photographs to reflect upon the relationship between images and notions of possession, loss, history, and beauty.
40 PART MOTET
LOCATION
Subways: N, R, Q, to 57th Street or N, R to Fifth Avenue; A, B, C, D, 1, 9 to Columbus Circle.
INSTRUCTIONS
*Before You Go*
Visit the site here.
- Play each of the six tracks on the soundcloud page when prompted by the artist in the audio.
- Look at the correlating photos when prompted by the artist.
On the Day: Meet at the Artists Gate park entrance at 59th Street and 6th Avenue. You’ll start on a bench near the Jose Marti statue.
