Susan Hiller

Lost and Found invokes language itself as a cultural construction that contains and generates worlds. It continues Hiller's focus on language groups and their speakers but now includes languages (some endangered and vulnerable, some extinct) that might be leaving the archive to be spoken in the present and the future. As if to reinforce the physicality of these possible returns and survivals, a flexing green oscilloscope line tracks the sound made by the voiced plosives, fricatives, and aspirations. This moving wave also acts as a synecdoche for the arena of technology; although the production of a prevailing and flattening culture, it also operates as a platform used by the excluded and the marginalized for agency and expression. Technology allows the voices of the dead to be heard. On being heard, these voices return to the living to be mouthed, to articulate the particular mappings and experiences of the worlds that these languages describe and contain.

In the large video installation, Resounding (Infrared) (2013), from which the exhibition takes its name, Hiller presents a 30-minute film that is projected on to the entire back wall of the darkened room. The film shows moving visual patterns in vibrant, entrancing colours – dark fluorescent pinks, blues and purples ­– overlaid with stirring lines that recall a heart monitor, and which have been translated from radio waves emitted by the Big Bang. By playing sound frequencies alongside these visuals, as well as eerie recordings of disembodied voices talking about their experiences with extraterrestrial phenomena, Hiller’s installation conjures a hypnotising world of magic and possibility that is difficult to leave or forget. By sitting down to watch and listen, the audience taps into a mental experience that facilitates meditation on the extraordinary and the uncanny.

Hiller orchestrates voices of the last speakers of extinct or endangered languages. Subtitles translate their utterances while the screen remains black. Neither silent nor a movie in the conventional sense, this work provides the framework for the audience to reflect on the speakers and the conditions that may have prompted the loss of their language. These silenced speakers buried in archives, have literally been given voice again by the artist.

The J. Street Project 2002–5 is a sixty-seven minute film that consists of a sequence of static camera shots of street signs in Germany that incorporate the word ‘Jude’ (German for ‘Jew’). Hiller found a total of 303 signs in streets, lanes, roads, avenues and alleys scattered throughout the country. The work focuses on the dissonance between these mundane, everyday signs and the memories they trigger of a genocidal history. The soundtrack records traffic noise, church bells and other incidental sounds. For this factual, indexical project Hiller maintained a neutral seriality in her approach. Cumulatively, however, it becomes clear that the signs are loaded with the memory of Jewish presence in the locations, not just from modern times but from thousands of years of history. The tension between past and present in the film highlights the sense of absence and traumatic loss. The place names operate as memorials of erasure.

The J. Street Project 2002–5 is a sixty-seven minute film that consists of a sequence of static camera shots of street signs in Germany that incorporate the word ‘Jude’ (German for ‘Jew’). Hiller found a total of 303 signs in streets, lanes, roads, avenues and alleys scattered throughout the country. The work focuses on the dissonance between these mundane, everyday signs and the memories they trigger of a genocidal history. The soundtrack records traffic noise, church bells and other incidental sounds. For this factual, indexical project Hiller maintained a neutral seriality in her approach. Cumulatively, however, it becomes clear that the signs are loaded with the memory of Jewish presence in the locations, not just from modern times but from thousands of years of history. The tension between past and present in the film highlights the sense of absence and traumatic loss. The place names operate as memorials of erasure.

The J. Street Project 2002–5 is a sixty-seven minute film that consists of a sequence of static camera shots of street signs in Germany that incorporate the word ‘Jude’ (German for ‘Jew’). Hiller found a total of 303 signs in streets, lanes, roads, avenues and alleys scattered throughout the country. The work focuses on the dissonance between these mundane, everyday signs and the memories they trigger of a genocidal history. The soundtrack records traffic noise, church bells and other incidental sounds. For this factual, indexical project Hiller maintained a neutral seriality in her approach. Cumulatively, however, it becomes clear that the signs are loaded with the memory of Jewish presence in the locations, not just from modern times but from thousands of years of history. The tension between past and present in the film highlights the sense of absence and traumatic loss. The place names operate as memorials of erasure.

Belshazzar's Feast draws on the experience of reverie - a trance-like state when the mind's censors relax their vigilance and imagination strays across time and space into fantasy.

Running on Empty (2017), stems from Hiller's commission to create Channels, a monumental audio-sculptural installation that incorporates 103 cathode-ray tube television sets programmed to play reports of near-death experiences. While constructing Channels, Hiller and Matt's Gallery Director Robin Klassnik discovered one particular television set that spontaneously and intermittently communicated a haunting, poignant message of its own. Their attempts to document that elusive message, to recreate and capture the phenomenon on camera, even as the television's functioning proceeded to decay and degenerate in a violent medley of colour and pattern, forms the subject of Running on Empty - a work which thus becomes about artistic making itself, about processes of collaboration, moments of serendipity, and the pleasures of visual play.