Behind massive red-velvet curtains, nearly a hundred speakers pepper a dimly-lit old train station. I'm in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, looking at Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's largest audio installation to date, The Murder of Crows.

Photo: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York

Most of the speakers sit on folding wooden chairs that crowd radially toward the epicentre of the cluster, where a dismembered gramophone sits on a flimsy red table. I would be inclined to call the entire setup flimsy, if I couldn't guess at the price of the ninety-eight premium speakers. Periodically, Cardiff's voice recites diaristic confessions and sensual accounts of horrid dream fragments. These interjections punctuate the undulating stereophonic soundscape, a patchwork of music and recorded noises: clanking machinery and Gregorian chants lead into sad-but-triumphant Soviet military songs, cinematic brass-scores follow a solemn baroque chorus, and fall into moody indie-rock rhythms (vocals, I think, by Cardiff herself) - all accompanied by the caws and wingflaps of a murder of crows.

Photo: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York

The exhibition's title comes from the formal term for a group of crows, and alludes to the curious social ritual that often occurs after a crow dies: seemingly in mourning, its relatives will saunter and caw in apparent unease for over 24 hours.

Cardiff's voice calmly explains her horrific nightmare; "I know something terrible is going to happen." She is the traumatized eyewitness of lurid scenes of slavery and torture, labour and technology, confinement and mutilation. "I've lost my leg! - Where has my leg gone? - Bring back my leg!" - humorous chamber music echoes the dream narrative.

Many of us sit with our eyes closed to take in the atmosphere. We sit in the dark, sometimes looking up at each other across the ersatz rows of chairs. Some talk to each other, or on phones. Two people in front of me are making out. Some pace the space. A guy to my right flips through Monopol (oh right, Art Cologne is soon). Some of us hold pens. We sometimes look up, still intently listening, to make fixed eye-contact - the type that might happen when bad news comes in on the radio - the type that might have happened in 1938 when listeners apparently accepted the staged news-report of space invaders in the voice of Orson Welles. In moments of silence we look down, or at the architecture, or at ourselves - blackties and bohemians. The laminated didactic handout is being passed around.

Photo: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York

I discover here that a "core reference point" for the work is Francisco de Goya's 1799 etching, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," from his "Caprichos" series. The image depicts a collapsed Goya, head-down in his drawing desk - owls and bats apparently flying from his subconscious. The work was created outside of his royal position as Carlos IV's court portraitist, and has been typically read as an Enlightenment critique of a corrupt Spanish society. Further, it was created in a period where Goya's increasing deafness left him disturbed and isolated. It is the image of an anguished man, obscurely injecting a voice of doubt into a valueless and overconfident society.

Where Goya's unease produced a quiet and reserved image of a tormented and buckled man, Cardiff and Bures Miller's anxiety results in the externalization of private fears and doubts into a 3D radio-play that takes on an operatic magnitude: there is a transformation from the realm of the personal to that of historical, social, and institutional proportions.

Despite my slight discontent with the apparent lack of architectural consideration, I cannot help but be drawn to the overall here-ness and now-ness demanded by the commanding audio experience: it is one that insists upon a sculptural awareness of the space, and truly transforms it into a redolent place. The artists' sculptural and psychological awareness of place, I infer, corresponds to the social rituals surrounding mourning.

The first places, philologist RP Harrison suggests, were gravesites. [1] That is, the first specific natural spaces that humans designated as significant were the sites of ancestral burial: the "here" in "here lies." Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future - that the dead indwell the living through our relation to heritage and place. The gravemarker, apparently, places a distinct formal connection between the living and the dead. And the social ritual that induces this connection: mourning.

Harrison offers Ernesto De Martino's research on mourning and ritualized objectification: he reveals its cathartic purpose of "depersonaliz(ing) the condition of grief by submitting it to a set of public, traditionally transmitted codes" - mourning becomes a measure to prevent going crazy. [2] De Martino's work considers mourning practices across the planet, and continuously unearths the vocal elements of grief. He suggests that mourning takes form primarily through anguished cries. "Indeed," Harrison adds, "it was perhaps through grief that the human voice gained its first articulations." [3]

Replacing the crude utterances of traditional mourning, Cardiff and Bures Miller's vociferations eloquently lament the loss of values in a globalized and technologically-advanced superculture. We, the audience, are cast into the role of the mourning crows - enacting our museological rituals and banding together with the woeful voice of Cardiff, in this study of death and human gathering. Like Goya's retreat into the recesses of his own mind, Cardiff and Bures Miller bring us to the aesthetic stages of psychic turmoil where we face our own mortality.

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[1] Harrison, RP. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago University Press, 2005, p.18.
[2] Ibid. p. 56-57
[3] Ibid. p. 62

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's The Murder of Crows runs at the Hamburger Bahnhof 14 March - 17 May 2009.

Mikhel Proulx is an artist and cultural worker living in Berlin. He holds a BFA in drawing from the Alberta College of Art + Design.