Janet Cardiff is celebrated for a body of work that comprises audio walks, film, photography and sound installations. Born in Canada and now living in British Colombia and Berlin, she often works with her partner Georges Bures Miller, but first gained recognition as a solo artist.

Cardiff has exhibited at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London. In 1999 she was commissioned by Artangel to make The Missing Voice (Case Study B) in London. Her work often enables an audience to experience sound as a spacial event, exploring a particular location or acoustic experience.

Cardiff’s acclaimed sound installation Forty Part Motet is presented for Groundwork in Richmond Chapel in Penzance. An arrangement of forty speakers enables listeners to move around amongst a choir of forty individual voices. The performance happens as though live in the space – the sound moves from one speaker to another, reverberating within the architecture as the singers’ voices meet each other in harmony.

Janet Cardiff represented Canada at the São Paulo Bienal (1998) and at the Istanbul Biennial (1999) with George Bures Miller. Cardiff and Bures Miller have gone on to work together, exhibiting at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada (2002), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2003), Vancouver Art Gallery (2005), Miami Art Museum (2007), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2008),  Art Gallery of Alberta (2010) and in Documenta 13 (2012). Cardiff represented Canada at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) with an exhibition that won La Biennale di Venezia Special Award.