'Susan Hiller: Divided Self' at The Kunsthaus Biel, Switzerland

29 January 2025

From 16 February – 20 April, the The Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’art Bienne presents Susan Hiller: Divided Self.

With a multimedia practice extending over 40 years, Susan Hiller was one of the most influential artists of her generation. Since first making innovative use of audio and visual technology in the early 1980s, her groundbreaking installations, multi-screen videos and audio works have achieved international recognition.

In Divided Self Hiller’s work is not presented chronologically but rather the exhibition aims to celebrate its great formal diversity, highlighting certain shared preoccupations and affinities between works that have rarely been exhibited together. It features seminal works including Belshazzar's Feast, Last Silent Movie and 10 Months.

Wild Talents (1997), a vast installation from 1997, incorporates two large-scale projections, a small TV set and a ring of votive lights. The large screens mine the horror film genre to explore fantasies of occult powers in young children, while the small screen simultaneously shows documentary material from a pilgrimage to visit children who have had authenticated religious visions, thus suggesting a cultural continuity in different registers of this belief in miraculous powers. During her pregnancy in 1976–7, Hiller took photographs of her body and kept a journal to record both the external and internal changes she experienced. In the resulting work on view in this show, 10 Months (1977–9), groups of photographs of her pregnant belly correspond to lunar months. The images are accompanied by journal excerpts from the same period.

This exhibition is curated by François Aubart.

Find out more via The Kuntshaus Biel.

Image: Susan Hiller, Rough Places, 2015, Unique archival pigment prints, 153 x 228 x 2 cm, 60 1/4 x 89 3/4 x 0 3/4 in, © Susan Hiller, Courtesy Lisson Gallery