In her debut exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Susan Hiller will present a number of recently discovered early pieces as well as celebrated classics and new works made this year. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since her Tate retrospective of 2011.
In her debut exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Susan Hiller will present a number of recently discovered early pieces as well as celebrated classics and new works made this year. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since her Tate retrospective of 2011.
A widely influential artist, Hiller has spent the past six decades questioning belief systems and the production of meaning. Her strategies and methodologies involve the examination of real and imagined phenomena, probing the unseen and the unheard in order to create art that evokes absences, memories and ghosts. Hiller has described her work as “a kind of archaeological investigation, uncovering something to make a different kind of sense of it” and “concentrating on what is unspoken, unacknowledged, unexplained and overlooked.” Her art has repeatedly been ground-breaking in its diversity of materials and forms, combining an astonishing range of media in works that join sight with sound, primitive desires with sophisticated technology and art with popular culture.
Occupying both gallery locations on Bell Street, the exhibition loosely groups Hiller’s practice into four interwoven and on-going themes: transformation, the unconscious, belief systems and the role of the artist as collector and curator.
Susan Hiller 13th November 2015 – 9th January 2016 Lisson 52/27 Bell Street London www.lissongallery.com
*Susan will be in conversation with Darian Leader, psychoanalyst and author, on Saturday 12th December 2015 from 10.30am-12.30pm. Limited availability. Email rsvp@lissongallery.com to reserve a place.
About The Artist
With a multimedia practice extending over 40 years, Susan Hiller is one of the most influential artists of her generation. Since first making innovative use of audio and visual technology in the early 1980s, her groundbreaking installations, multi-screen videos and audio works have achieved international recognition. Each of Hiller’s works is based on specific cultural artefacts from our society, which she uses as basic materials. Many pieces explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79), near death experiences (Channels, 2013), and collective experiences of unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity (Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983-4; Psi Girls, 1999; Witness, 2000). Hiller’s powerful and resonant films range from the J Street Project (2002-05), a chillingly extensive search for every street sign in Germany bearing the word Juden (Jew), to The Last Silent Movie (2007), which also documents disappearance and absence, although this time through speech recordings of dying or extinct languages. Her psychologically charged and thematically varied practice amounts to an impassioned plea for the joys and mysteries associated with irrationality.
Susan Hiller was born in 1940 in Tallahasse, Florida, and has been based mainly in London since the early 1960s. After studying film and photography at The Cooper Union and archaeology and linguistics at Hunter College in New York, Hiller went on to a National Science Foundation fellowship in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her work features in numerous international private and public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London and the Centro de Arte Contemporanea Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil. Her career has been recognised by survey exhibitions at the ICA, London (1986); ICA, Philadelphia (1998); Museu Serralves, Porto (2004); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2006); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007) and, most recently by, a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain (2011).
