Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Crows are said to gather around the dead, their black shapes presaging the flight of the soul. The collective noun for a grouping of these birds is “a murder of crows,” the assonant association between the words underlining their connection with death. This is the departure point for Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 2008 installation named for such a flock, a work that features a room of chairs populated with ninety-eight loudspeakers, through which words, sound, and music are played to create what the artists describe as “a film without images.”

Unlike a visual image, which reveals itself instantly, sound discloses itself sequentially, and in this case, the disclosure is that of Cardiff, describing three nightmarish dreams. Her voice comes through an old-fashioned loudspeaker that sits atop a central table, while other sounds emerge at different points around the room, passing from speaker to speaker, so that footsteps appear to ring out, moving and echoing through the space, at times seeming to surround one completely.

Cardiff’s narrated dreams are interspersed with noises of machinery, slamming doors, barking dogs, the sawing of wood. Music plays: a Russian army choir, opera, a Tibetan prayer, a lullaby, and as each sound section engages, different moods are inflected. The entire sound work is also haunted by the cawing of crows, which, taken together with the exhibition title, inspires the sense that death is close. It is entirely appropriate that the narration is a sequence of dreams, because as with a dream, the immersive experience of The Murder of Crows is one in which feeling is intensely felt, and yet meaning is fleeting: out of reach, but only just.