The accumulations and incantations in Susan Hiller’s work perform something like brain creep – an itching, nagging echo in the memory – long after any encounter with her art. The voices from 400 tiny speakers dangling from wires in the installation ‘Witness’ (2000), which recount incidents of UFO sightings in different languages, will forever in my mind be linked to the pre-millennial hysteria surrounding extra-terrestrial contact, especially of the wishful-thinking Third Kind – abductions, impregnations and preposterous alien probes included. Hiller’s 2007 film ‘The Last Silent Movie’ also collects speech recordings but this time of dying or extinct languages, and so is a perfect lament to those tribal cultures that are themselves fast becoming merely the stuff of archives.
Hiller’s most powerful and resonant piece, the ‘J Street Project’ (2002-05) simply records all street signs in Germany bearing the word Jude (Jew). It’s a chilling, open end to the show – not only is the gallery itself physically cold and uncomfortable (having no bench on which to while away the hour-long film), but there’s a conspicuous lack of humanity up on screen, which also makes it unforgettable. Yet even her most grating and irksome film, ‘An Entertainment’ (1990), in which a nightmarishly violent Punch and Judy show is translated to reveal its full adult horror, will linger and insinuate its way into your consciousness, whether you like it or not.
For four decades Hiller has been collating, remembering and reaching out to subjects that are necessarily beyond her grasp. Dreams, superstitions, automatic writing and other abstract concepts are questioned, attempted and then documented, which can make for oddly dry readings of such occult phenomena. The mere fact of her discovering so many seaside picture postcards featuring the phrase ‘Rough Sea’, for example, might have sufficed as a revelation for a newly arrived American in 1970s Britain, were it not then beaten into submission by Hiller’s artistic drive to catalogue each image so studiously. Her academic treatments of psychic powers or spiritual sources of water are legitimising and ridiculing in equal measures, not because she sits on an anthropological fence, but because she recognises her own absurd, contradictory position as an artist (and a female one at that) as being part-shaman, part-educator – both a wizened seer and a charlatan.
Of course, she’s not a believer in aura portrait photography or spontaneous human levitation either, yet she exhibits remarkable series of both types of imagery here and in her concurrent commercial gallery show. None of this yogic flying or communing with the dead may be really real, but why attempt to prove otherwise when this life – and the next – would be infinitely less rich? Hiller’s target-shifting practice, then, is an impassioned plea for the highs and hardships associated with irrationality.