Susan Hiller
Bad Dreams

Bad Dreams is the first survey of British artist Susan Hiller (b. 1940, USA –  † 2019, UK) in Berlin, a city that shaped her practice for several years in the early 2000s. A groundbreaking figure in conceptual and video art, Hiller’s five-decade practice has influenced successive generations, and spans film, large-scale multimedia and video installations, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. Eluding easy categorization, the artist’s work probes the mind’s construction of fantasy, fear, and meaning, uncovering the hidden forces that shape perception and experience.

Drawing on Hiller’s enduring fascination with the (im)possibility of translating certain altered states of consciousness and phenomena, Bad Dreams unfolds as a series of encounters. The exhibition features hypnotic and phantasmagorical audiovisual works alongside sculptures of collected domestic objects and images drawn from the internet, film, and television. Tracing the workings of the unconscious and subconscious, it reveals the artist’s atemporal yet strikingly contemporary reflection on how personal and communal imaginaries are formed and circulated within cultural artefacts, mass media, and popular culture.

Curator: Emma Enderby & Liberty Adrien
Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble