calendario eventi  :: 

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3/2/2009

Susan Hiller

Index - the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm

Index presents the work of Susan Hiller with a focus on the installation Magic Lantern (1987) and Triplet (1991 – 2009). A major influential figure in British and European art over the past four decades, Hiller's work has its roots in Surrealism and can be framed in terms of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art as well as her early history in anthropology.

Magic Lantern is one of the many works of Hiller's that use apparently simple forms of illumination. It is a sublime slide projection, in the dark, generated by three discs of coloured light driven by electronic pulses. This technical device has been taken from its original context, as an early scientific experiment – this is not a benign return for Hiller for as in all her work her sources become fragments torn from a context. This is also the fate of Magic Lantern's synchronised soundtrack of recorded 'ghost' voices of the experiments of Latvian scientist Konstantin Raudive. Science and so-called irrational beliefs are re-exposed here as a meditative, critical practice. Hiller's gestures toward Freud are also here as it is in much of her work, "… Freud said that an un-critical belief in psychic powers was an attempt at compensation for what he poignantly called "the lost appeal of life on this earth" '.

Triplet (1991-2009) is an inverse play on illumination to that of Magic Lantern. These are images from a Mexican children's game on 35mm slides, illuminated by small night-lights. Hiller's interest in appropriating objects from popular culture, has been seen as redemptive rather than populist, for example in Lucy Lippard's writing on her work (1986). Yet there are other aspects to this appropriation. Hiller has spoken before about what can be perceived as the ambivalence in her work, “I have never really had a formula for selecting what I work with. They usually turn out to be things that I deeply love and hate”.

The objects that make up Triplet are 35 mm slides, mounted on three brackets and installed vertically on the wall. The three are an echo of the affect of Hiller's Magic Lantern with its three discs of light, red, yellow and blue that overlap and shift in scale: either small or flooding of our visual field. Jean Fisher writing on Magic Lantern recognizes that, "… three is never a privileged number. Two overlapping colours make a third; but three overlapping colours make a multiplicity". Triplet is installed at the entrance of the Magic Lantern installation at Index where it may function as a guardian or guide. In the dimmed light, each slide, backlit with tiny globes becomes jewel-like, a child's night-lights meant for the realm of the dreaming child. The relationship to technologies of the image are central to both works in this exhibition, technologies that in Hiller's hands themselves become cultural artefacts. The differences and similarities in these two works are put in dialogue - they also show that Hiller's work gives the current interest in 'spirituality' in the contemporary art scene a twist, alerting us to this new interest itself as perhaps a cultural symptom.

Catalogues, anthologies and critical writing by the artist will be available as will a pamphlet with a commissioned text by curator and writer Denise Robinson, co-curator of the exhibition. Denise Robinson will give a lecture on the work of Susan Hiller 11 March 6pm.

Opening 4 February 5 - 8pm

Index
St Paulsgatan 3 - Stockholm

stampa

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