Susan Hiller

Born in 1940 in Tallahassee (USA).

Although her work has been shown in numerous European and American museums over the last twenty years, and notably in a major retrospective at the Tate in 2011, Susan Hiller has had few exhibitions in France. In the large basement rooms of les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouse four immersive works will be on show, including a new piece, all linked by a mesh of human voices, from the lost languages of The Last Silent Movie to the stirrings and statements collected in Resoundings (Ultra-Violet).
 
Susan Hiller’s early work was strongly influenced by minimal and conceptual art. She then went on to develop what she calls “paraconceputalism,” substituting the logic and rationality of these two tendencies with a strong interest in unexplained phenomena: visions of UFOs (Witness, 2000), near death experiences (Channels, 2013), and paranormal phenomena (Psi Girls, 1999). To explore these zones of great uncertainty she uses methods she learned from her training in anthropology, such as field research, collecting and classifying data and statements, comparison and analysis, presentations and expositions. These methods bestow greater credibility on her objects of study and, in turn, are pushed beyond their usual neutrality and objectivity by the extreme nature of the subject, becoming open to invention. “To enquire, and to transform, these are the leitmotifs that run throughout Hiller’s oeuvre,” observes English curator James Lingwood. Transformation here means a lot more than organising and analysing. Hiller says that she chose art in order to substitute the imaginary for the factual, and also to renounce the distance of the supposedly external, detached observer in order to “be inside all her activities.” For distance is probably one of the major questions running through her work. She grounds this in everyday experience the better to bring out the unknown (disappearing languages in The Last Silent Movie, 2007-8), the inaccessible (the radio waves from the Big Bang in Resoundings, 2014), and the unexplained. In this way she questions the limits of experience in a highly effective reflexive process whereby the viewer has a very internalised and personal mental and sensorial experience of each installation. Many of her works of the last two decades do without images, using only sounds and speech. Those languages that are dying out seem that much closer to us because we only hear the words and their translation: the speaker is not physically present, nor do we see their more or less picturesque environment. The same goes for the visions of UFOs: their oral description is given form only by the memory and imagination of the listener. This deepens their impact. In this way the archive patiently built up by Hiller the collector suddenly comes alive.