'Susan Hiller: Dedicated to the Unknown' at Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal

13 February 2025

From 15 March – 22 June, Culturgest presents Susan Hiller: Dedicated to the Unknown.

Dedicated to the Unknown is the first solo exhibition by artist Susan Hiller since her passing in 2019. With a multimedia practice extending over five decades, Hiller’s unique body of art materialised in many forms, including experimental group investigations in the 1970s, painting, photography, sculpture, and groundbreaking audiovisual installations.

Hiller was committed to investigating our culture’s ambivalent fascination with things that lie outside the scope of normal, everyday comprehension. The selected works explore ideas considered alternative or esoteric, or even marginalised or ridiculed: extrasensory perception; beliefs in mystical powers; the significance of dreams; practices of automatic writing; and collective experiences of subconscious, unconscious, and paranormal activity.

The work’s power does not lie in either advocating for, or denying the truth of such phenomena, but rather presents the existence of such practices, beliefs, and experiences as a ‘social fact’, excavating hidden aspects of culture to reveal there is something mysterious beneath the surface of what at first seems easy to understand; life is full of unknowns.

The exhibition features early group investigations Dream Mapping (1974), experiments with automatism, rarely seen paintings from the 1980s and the five channel installation Psi Girls (1999).

This exhibition is curated by Andrew Price.

Find out more via Culturgest.

Image: Susan Hiller, After Duchamp, 2016 – 2017, 50 colour archival dry prints, 30.5 x 30.5 cm (each), 12 x 12 in, © Susan Hiller, Courtesy Lisson Gallery