Inkjet using lightfast ink

Edition of 100

Framed 19.5cm x 12.5cm x 1cm

Signed and numbered by the artist. Framed as the artist intended.

£250 framed.

 

‘Walking is like the flow of history. One footstep after another, one event after another. Every time we choose an action or direction we change everything that might have been.’

Night Walk for Edinburgh

Janet Cardiff (b.1957, Brussels, Ontario, Canada) and George Bures Miller (b.1960, Vegreville, Alberta, Canada) last showed their work in Edinburgh in 2008, with their Fruitmarket Gallery exhibition The House of Books Has No Windows. They returned to Edinburgh to explore its streets in a video walk. Cardiff and Miller have been making audio walks since 1991, and began making video walks in 2001, for locations across the world including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001), dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany (2012), and the 13th Sydney Biennale (2014). The only other walk they have made for the UK is The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999), an audio walk that takes you through the streets of the East End of London from the Whitechapel Gallery. Edinburgh was one of the few remaining cities in which the artists wanted to make one of their walks.

In both the audio and video walks, Cardiff ’s voice leads the listener’s footsteps, gently nudging you along the route, whilst also offering disjointed observations and reflections that as a whole weave a nonlinear, and often unsettling, narrative. Filmed and edited by Miller using a Steadicam and binaural sound recording, the video walks – called ‘physical cinema’ by the artists – add a second layer to the sensation of moving through the city. Created using multidirectional microphones in place of ears, binaural recording results in a sound environment that is spatially logical, and can often be difficult to distinguish from its real world equivalent. The effect can be uncanny, as sounds and images double up, merging fiction and reality, in turn intensified by the dreamlike quality of Cardiff ’s voice.

Night Walk for Edinburgh winds its way through Edinburgh’s Old Town. While you are alone on this walk, plugged into your headphones and directed by a small screen, you are also witness to the lives of others: the route on screen is populated by pedestrians, tourists, runners,

figures glimpsed through windows and doors, and Cardiff ’s voice is your constant companion, your guide. At different points you happen upon the theatre of the city – dancers and musicians emerging through the gloom into brief and otherworldly performance. And the city itself also has a real presence, as Cardiff draws attention to small architectural and incidental details and gently tugs at the threads of the city’s history, musing on the nature of historical narrative itself through snippets of poetry by Walter Scott and Norman MacCaig.

Through such well-trodden streets, this is neither history walk nor ghost walk, though it evokes both. Staged at twilight, it not only sits on the threshold of day and night, but also slips between the gaps of the usual tourist trails and guided walks, as you navigate the city obliquely, as if on another plane of reality. At one point Cardiff says: ‘Sometimes I don’t know if my imagination is leaking into my reality, or if I’m remembering something.’ Repetitions of signs and figures accentuate this feeling, flitting between the incidental and the significant, like clues in a detective novel. Edinburgh emerges as a city of doubles, of Jekyll and Hyde, of the old and the new, of parallel realities, mingled with uncanny sightings of Cardiff ’s red-coated doppelgangers. This atmosphere is redoubled when the screen glitches and jump cuts to another reality, in which a forensic team appears to be investigating a crime that took place on the streets through which you move. Who has been killed? And when did this take place? Like Cardiff ’s unfinished book, that she tells us she left on the plane, the walk does not offer answers, creating unease – what have these streets seen?

Note Found in Pocket, Edition of 100, £250 was produced to mark the launch of this major work. It is a limited edition print featuring a still from the video walk. Note Found in Pocket is a tiny moment from the experimental narrative of Night Walk for Edinburgh.

All editions are sent by tracked courier in the UK and internationally. Following purchase, the bookshop will arrange a suitable delivery date. If you have any questions, contact us via bookshop@fruitmarket.co.uk or on +44 (0) 131 226 8181.

P&P: £30.00 UK, £85 Europe, £105 Rest of World.