Limits of Nostalgia. Cardiff & Bures Miller

The Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego is presenting a retrospective show of the work by Janet Cardiff y Georges Bures Miller. Until 21 January 2014 one can see Lost in the Memory Palace in the branch that the museum has in La Jolla.

The selection of pieces gathers together examples of their work from the mid nineties up until the present day, offering a panoramic vision of the intentions that underlie their installations. The exhibition is composed of the well-travelled The Dark Pool (1995) and The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), Opera for a Small Room (2003), the incredible Roadtrip (2004), The Killing Machine (2007) and the mediocre Experiment in F Minor (2013).

As ever, theirs are scenarios scripted to the very last detail, where the script or the structure takes precedence over the rest of the elements and determines to a great extent the public’s experience. Little margin is left for a plurality of experience in their installations, as the wonder of their virtuoso technique seems to be a condition, in their case, that marks out the frontiers of what those who approach their pieces can feel or think.

Nevertheless, Cardiff and Bures Miller continue to confront us with the, always opportune, question about the limits of fiction. Playing with the barriers that separate the inside from the outside in their works they also allude to those that define the separation between representation, scenography and the institution that houses them. What are the physical limits and what are the connoted ones. Which governs the other. The works and the title successfully cry over the micro-stories and do so within the walls of a museum.