Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet

The Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation are pleased to present Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet, the first exhibition of the artist’s work on the East End of Long Island. Over the course of a forty-year career, Janet Cardiff (Canadian, b. 1957 in Brussels, Ontario) has become internationally recognized for her transportive and immersive multimedia installations and audio and video walks, often made alongside her longtime collaborator George Bures Miller. The presentation at the Parrish comprises the 2001 sound installation The Forty Part Motet, a reworking of a sixteenth-century musical composition by the English composer Thomas Tallis.

Tallis is regarded as the most influential English composer of his generation, and remains one of the most celebrated Renaissance composers of today. Tallis served as a court composer to four English monarchs—Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I—and was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, a group of priests and musicians who traveled with the monarch. One of Tallis’ greatest works was “Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui,” a motet—or multi-voice choral piece—based on a sacred text from the apocryphal Book of Judith; the composition’s Latin title translates to “I have never put my hope in any other.” Tallis’ motet was written for forty singers, organized into eight five-voice choirs. When performed, the sound gradually builds as each choir joins, the music expanding and contracting as it passes between the voices. When Cardiff first heard a recording of the piece in 1998, she was struck by its spatial qualities: “I wanted to step inside of the music and actually hear each of the different harmonies.”

In Cardiff’s installation, forty individually recorded voices singing “Spem in Alium” emit from forty speakers. Like the arrangement of the choral composition, the speakers are configured in eight separate choirs, each consisting of five voices (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass). “I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis,” explains Cardiff. “You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other, and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”

While creating an immersive sonic experience, Cardiff’s installation also highlights the role the individual voice plays in the structure of the musical piece. Moving from speaker to speaker, visitors are able to hear “Spem in Alium” from the vantage point of each individual performer. “Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices,” Cardiff explains. An example of Cardiff’s interest in how sound can shape an environment, the construction of The Forty Part Motet also gives agency to the viewer, where they can, in the artist’s words, “choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.”

Since its creation in 2001, The Forty Part Motet has been exhibited internationally, including at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2025); The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY (2024); the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2019); Switch House at Tate Modern, London (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2015-16); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2014); The Met Cloisters, New York, NY (2013); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2012); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2006); among many others.

Artwork Credits:

Sung by: Salisbury Cathedral Choir

Recording and Postproduction by: SoundMoves

Edited by: George Bures Miller

Produced by: Field Art Projects

Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet is curated by Scout Hutchinson, The FLAG Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Parrish Art Museum, and Jonathan Rider, FLAG’s Director, with Caroline Cassidy, FLAG’s Deputy Director.

About the Partnership
Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet marks the third iteration of a new curatorial partnership between The FLAG Art Foundation and the Parrish Art Museum. Between 2026 and 2030, the two organizations will collaborate on three exhibitions annually across two adjoining galleries at the Museum. This partnership builds on the recent FRESH PAINT collaboration, a rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions at the Parrish that began in June 2024. Signaling the deepening relationship between FLAG and the Parrish, this expanded partnership also marks the growth of FLAG’s commitment to supporting contemporary art practices of all forms beyond its brick-and-mortar exhibition space in Manhattan.

Exhibition Support
Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of The FLAG Art Foundation.

The Parrish Art Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton Union Free School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.

About Janet Cardiff
Based in rural British Columbia, Cardiff has worked in a wide range of media, including film, video, and photography. She participated in the Münster Skulptur Projekte in 1997 and exhibited in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh 1999. She also represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2001 in collaboration with her partner George Bures Miller, with whom she has been working since 1995. Major surveys of Cardiff and Miller’s works have toured to MoMA PS1, New York; The Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; the Castello Rivoli, Turin; MACBA, Barcelona; Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and the ARoS Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark. The artists have created site-specific commissions for Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Los Angeles Philharmonic, CA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. In 2023, they opened the Cardiff Miller Art Warehouse (CMAW), a large exhibition space in Enderby, British Columbia, to permanently showcase their multimedia works. Cardiff and Miller are currently represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and Gallery Koyanagi in Tokyo.

About The FLAG Art Foundation
The FLAG Art Foundation is a non-collecting, nonprofit exhibition space that mounts solo, two-person, and thematic group exhibitions centering on emerging and established artists from around the globe. Organized by a diverse community of curators and thinkers within and beyond the art world, FLAG opened to the public in 2008 and has staged over 100 exhibitions celebrating the work of nearly 1,000 artists. Committed to providing education and resources for its surrounding community, and across New York City, all exhibitions and programs—including artist talks, artist-led workshops, and guided tours for school and museum groups—are free and open to the public.

The FLAG Art Foundation was founded by Glenn Fuhrman, an art patron and philanthropist, alongside his wife Amanda, a Co-Founder of The Fuhrman Family Foundation. Fuhrman is a Trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and The Tate Americas Foundation, New York, NY; and is a Board Member of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA. He is also a Board Member of the 92nd Street Y, New York, NY, and The Central Park Conservancy, New York, NY.