“I have dedicated myself to working with ‘ghosts’ – that is, cultural remnants, fragments and things that are invisible to most people, yet of great significance to a select few: situations, ideas and experiences that haunt us collectively.”
Image gallery
Susan Hiller, Channels, 2013. Courtesy Lisson Gallery © Estate of Susan Hiller.
– Susan Hiller
Dreams, trance-like states, hallucinations, spirituality, faith, altered states of consciousness, encounters with the afterlife and mystical phenomena of all kinds have given shape to longings, fantasies, fears and beliefs across cultures and eras.
Over the course of five decades of her artistic practice, the British artist Susan Hiller (b. 1940, USA – d. 2019, UK) explored these mysterious themes and how such experiences are represented, remembered and recounted.
‘Bad Dreams’ is the first retrospective exhibition of Hiller’s work in Berlin – a city that shaped her artistic practice in the early 2000s.
The exhibition is dedicated to the artist’s ongoing exploration of a question that remains highly relevant to our present day: how are our personal and collective imaginations shaped and revealed through images and objects, mass media and popular culture?
Building on her enduring fascination with the (im)possibility of making visible phenomena that defy simple explanation, Bad Dreams unfolds as a series of experiences. Ghostly images appear, bodies defy gravity, and children demonstrate supernatural abilities, whilst voices recount UFO sightings and near-death experiences. For Hiller, the uncanny is never far removed from everyday life.
Children’s wallpaper and toy kitchens point to the domestic sphere as a space in which social expectations and notions take shape, whilst holy water, enigmatic images and other curiosities reveal how ordinary objects are imbued with meaning through associations, context and narratives.
The exhibition also extends to the internet, which Hiller recognised early on as an artistic medium, a repository of psychological longings, beliefs and secrets.
As a pioneering figure in conceptual and multimedia art, Hiller explored how fantasy, fear and meaning are constructed and how they shape our perception of the world.
*Bad Dreams* addresses an epistemological question that lies at the heart of her work: how do we give form to things we cannot fully explain?
