Susan Hiller

 

 

Susan Hiller (USA, 1940-2019) began her artistic career in London in the early 1970s. She soon became known for her innovative artistic practice, including group participation works such as Dream Mapping (1974); museum/archive installations such as Fragments (1978), Enquiries/Inquiries (1973 and 1975), and Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972/6); and many other works executed in a wide range of media used to explore automatic writing, extra-sensory perception, photo booths, wallpaper, postcards, and other disregarded aspects of popular culture.  A common denominator among all of her works is that they start with a cultural artefact present in our society. In her work, Hiller excavates facets of our shared cultural production that are overlooked, ignored, or plainly rejected. Her diverse projects have been described as investigations into culture’s ‘sub-conscious’. Her sculpture has been recognised with retrospectives at the Institute of Contemporary Art (1986) and the Tate Liverpool (1996), in numerous monographic and individual exhibitions, and in major international collective showings. Susan Hiller has received numerous awards and acknowledgements, such as the Gulbenkian Foundation Prize for Best Visual Artist (London 1977 and 1978); the National Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (USA 1982); the Visual Arts Board Travelling Fellowship (Australia 1982); the Guggenheim Fellowship (USA 1998); and the DAAD scholarship (Berlin 2002).