Susan Hiller: 'The J. Street Project' With Jörg Heiser and Barbara Casavecchia

The project began in 2002 during Susan Hiller’s fellowship at the DAAD’s Berlin Artists’ Programme, when the artist came across a street named ‘Jüdenstraße’ and realised that such street names preserve traces of a vanished Jewish presence.

Over the following three years, Hiller visited all such locations in Germany – a total of 303, ranging from idyllic country roads to mundane suburban cul-de-sacs and inner-city shopping streets – which she documented through photography and film. Taken as a whole, the street names become a kind of unconscious memorial, hidden from plain sight.

The completed project comprises three works: a 67-minute film, an installation featuring photographs, an accompanying map and a directory of the streets, and a comprehensive artist’s book co-published by Compton Verney and the DAAD’s Berlin Artists’ Programme.

Taking the film as its starting point, the evening offers an opportunity to re-examine *The J. Street Project* within the context of Hiller’s broader artistic practice and to reflect on the enduring questions of memory, absence, place and the traces of the historical past in our everyday surroundings.

The film screening will be accompanied by a conversation between Jörg Heiser, art critic, curator and Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts, and Barbara Casavecchia, Editor-in-Chief of Mousse Magazine.

IN ENGLISH