Susan Hiller Divided Self

Born in 1940 in the United States, Susan Hiller moved to London in 1970, where she died in 2019. In a career spanning almost 50 years, she became interested in automatic writing, dreams, postcards, television programmes, magic, encounters with extraterrestrials and many other vernacular practices, guided by a quest for alternatives to the supposedly objective neutrality of science. As a woman in a patriarchal world, attentive to the fate of social minorities and non-Western cultures, Hiller notes that what is repressed is relegated to the realm of the subjective and the sensitive, considered to be negligible. This is what led her to take an interest in minor, low-profile, socially marginalised subjects, which she approaches not as objects to be examined with detachment but as phenomena to be experienced. Susan Hiller’s work celebrates subjectivity, elevated to the level of knowledge. The artist claimed to be transformed by each encounter with cultural artefacts, and thus to be fragmented, unstable, traversed by diverse voices. As a result, she developed a body of work of great formal diversity, far from the stable unity on which universal knowledge and identifiable authorship are based. This exhibition does not present her work chronologically but aims to highlight certain preoccupations that have accompanied it.

Curation: François Aubart