Thursday 6 November, 2008 Artprojx at Anthology Film Archives
32, 2nd Avenue (at 2nd Street) New York NY 10003
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org 6-7pm.
Screening and talk by Susan Hiller Introduced by David Gryn | Artprojx www.artprojx.com
The Last Silent Movie by Susan Hiller, 2007 (21 mins)
An old man confronts us with some truths about language. The strangeness of his voice merges with the buzzing and humming artifacts of an archaic recording mechanism. A young girl repeats words she is trying to memorize in what sounds like French. Several men exuberantly chant fragments of a creation myth. Next, an elderly woman tells a story of jealousy and murder to an appreciative listener. Then a gruff voice enquires about fishing conditions …
The Last Silent Movie opens the unvisited, silent archives of extinct and endangered languages to create a composition of voices that are not silent. They are not silent because someone is listening. The work sets free some of the ghosts and spectres haunting the unacknowledged unheimlich of sound recording which allows us to hear the words and voices of people mostly now dead in The Last Silent Movie, some of them sing, some tell stories, some recite vocabulary lists and some of them, directly or indirectly, accuse us, the listeners, of injustice.
“There aren’t many artists whose every new work you would want to see and Hiller is one of them.”
Laura Cummings, The Observer, 2008
“Susan Hiller amplifies archived voices speaking in near-extinct languages, translations of which appear on a screen slung from the ceiling. It is a cinema of the unseen and the no-longer heard. There are snatches of song and folk myth, exhortations and lamentations, last voices no one can understand speaking languages in which no new thing will ever again be said.”
Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 2008
Also in New York in November:
Susan Hiller The Last Silent Movie The Museum of Modern Art Modern Mondays, Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2 Monday 3 November at 7.30pm
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 www.moma.org
Susan Hiller: The J. Street Project The Jewish Museum New York 6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
Susan Hiller traveled to every German street with the prefix “Juden” (Jews), photographing and filming every one of them. The street names continue to mark 303 places where Jewish communities lived prior to Nazi rule, including country roads, village lanes, and busy streets in large cities. Hiller’s installation consists of a monumental grid of photographs accompanied by a list of locations and a map, as well as a 67-minute film and a book containing the photographs and additional texts.
The Jewish Museum 1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street New York, NY 10128
www.thejewishmuseum.org
Susan Hiller’s solo exhibition, Proposals and Demonstrations, will run from 30 October – 20 December, 2008 at Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place, London, W1K 2EX
For more information, please contact mail@timothytaylorgallery.com
