Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize 2011: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller — Award Ceremony and opening of Pariser Platz :: June 28, 2011; 7:00 pm :: Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz, Plenarsaal, Berlin.

The Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2011 has been awarded jointly to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. On this occasion the artist duo from Canada will be showing four works in the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts). The exhibition at Pariser Platz will focus on the construction and deconstruction of acoustic perception and illusionist spaces. The real occurrences in Cardiff’s and Miller’s stories only reveal themselves when people enter the space and engage their visual and tactile senses. An additional layer is revealed in the process of recalling and imagining spaces, objects and relations. As an observer-listener, the visitor is tugged back and forth between dream and trauma, horror and curiosity. What people see often fails to match with what they are hearing, or it is hard to associate a particular sound with its imagined location.

One of these intriguingly narrative main works is entitled Killing Machine (2007), on display for the first time in Berlin.

Partly inspired by Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and partly by the American system of capital punishment as well as the current political situation, Killing Machine is an ironic approach to killing and torture machines. A moving megaphone speaker encircles an electric dental chair. The chair is covered in pink fun fur with leather straps and spikes. In the installation are two robotic arms that hover and move- sometimes like a ballet, and sometimes attacking the invisible prisoner in the chair with pneumonic pistons. A disco ball turns above the mechanism reflecting an array of coloured lights while a guitar hit by a robotic wand wails and a wall of old TV’s turns on and off creating an eerie glow.