Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, House Burning, 2001
video
3 m, 2 s
Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, gift of Wayne Baerwaldt

From January until May, the Belkin’s outdoor screen will exhibit Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 3-minute video House Burning daily from 9 am until 9 pm.

A house is on fire. Eliciting the thrill and dismay that accompanies fire-watching, House Burning invites us into a kind of voyeurism, unsure of what we are witness to. For the video, the artists arranged to burn down a derelict farmhouse in rural Ontario while the local fire department supervised. The camera approaches the farmhouse from a muddy road while the viewer hears the sounds of the sirens from far off and eventually sees the firefighters arrive, with no particular sense of urgency. Footage from this event was used in The Paradise Institute (2001), an experiential installation which the artists presented at the 2001 Venice Biennale’s Canadian Pavilion. Today, when our global experience is one of unsettlement, when our collective house is on fire, when our shared knowledge is unstable, Cardiff and Miller’s work queries ideas of truth and delivers us to the fragile line between reality and fiction.

Collaboratively working since 1995, Canadian artists Janet Cardiff (b. 1957) and George Bures Miller (b. 1960) are internationally recognized for their immersive multimedia works that create multisensory experiences which draw the viewer into often unsettling narratives. Representing Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale with Paradise Institute (2001), the artists received the Biennale’s Premio Prize and Benesse Prize, which recognizes artists who “break new artistic ground with an experimental and pioneering spirit.” In addition, Cardiff and Miller have had numerous solo shows at international venues including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum; Vancouver Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Modern Art Oxford; Miami Art Museum; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; and Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt. A major show of the artists’ work is on view at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany (2022), and will travel to Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland in June 2023. Their work has been included in recent group exhibitions and biennales such as the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014 and dOCUMENTA (13). Recently, the artists debuted new site-specific commissions for Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, CA, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain.