Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet

Exhibition Website

Jun 8 2019 - Sep 15 2019

Clark Art Institute

Williamstown, MA

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s acclaimed 2001 sound installation, The Forty Part Motet, deconstructs Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century choral work Spem in alium (Hope in any other) by assigning each of the forty voices to a single freestanding speaker in the gallery. 

Visitors can weave their way through this ring of speakers, coming in close to hear an individual singer’s voice—and even breath—or standing in the center to be struck by the polyphonic force of the whole. 

The work’s setting at the Clark, in Tadao Ando’s Conforti Pavilion, affords sweeping views of the landscape beyond its glazed walls.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

  • Installation
  • Contemporary
  • Janet Cardiff

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