9 May - 17 August 2008



The BAWAG FOUNDATION is presenting Susan Hiller’s first exhibition in Austria, Outlaw Cowgirl and Other Works, which will be on show from 9 May to 17 August at the Foundationsquartier, Wiedner Hauptstraße 15, A-1040 Vienna. Admission is free.

For more than thirty years, Susan Hiller has been exploring visual phenomena that cannot be explained rationally and are therefore dismissed as superstition, imagination, or hallucination by today’s society. Hiller, however, regards such experiences as an indispensible part of every culture because they reveal society’s desires and fears. Thus, dreams and other exceptional states of consciousness, in which the visual merges with the visionary, form the foundation of her work, which imagines the collective subconscious and revolves around the uncanny. The subjects featured are the occult, ghosts, and dreams. Three decades ago, Hiller’s approach anticipated artistic strategies which are more up-to-date today than ever.

The uncanny as an essential concept of various discourses in philosophy, literature, film, architecture, psychoanalysis, and gender studies is on the upswing again these days. Its range spans from the domestic to the secret and eerie, joining the familiar with the strange, the intimacy of protected privacy with the threats it is exposed to. The discussion of the issue can be traced back to Sigmund Freud’s famous essay published in 1919. In addition, the uncanny has a complex history beginning in the Age of Enlightenment and accompanying modernity as its shadow. The unfathomable and uncanny also has a long tradition in twentieth-century art, which has been marginalized by art history though in favor of an unblemished modernity.

Susan Hiller. Outlaw Cowgirl and Other Works, curated by Christine Kintisch, Director of the BAWAG FOUNDATION, displays a comprehensive selection of Susan Hiller’s works from the past ten years, including From the Freud Museum (1991–1996). This work – a sharp-witted and literate commentary on Freud’s amazing collection of art and antiquities, his library, and his house in London – consists of a series of archeological conservation boxes in a vitrine. Walking past it, visitors will set out on a personal journey that will disclose the secrets of each box. The show also presents the audio installation Witness (2000), a multilingual collection of reports about people and their encounters with UFOs. J. Street Project (2002–2005) shows German streets and squares whose signs testify to the former presence of Jews. With 303 photographs and a video, Hiller has produced an impressive meditation on a word and a bitter period in German history.

Susan Hiller ranks among the most fascinating and influential women artists of our time. Her work has had a profound impact, particularly on the younger generation of British artists. However, she has also exercised a considerable influence internationally. In recent years, Susan Hiller’s works were shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2007), at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin (2006), at the Kunsthalle Basel (2005), at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead (2004), and at the Museo Serralves in Porto (2004).

Born in Florida in 1940, Susan Hiller studied art and anthropology in the United States. In 1969, she moved to England, where she still lives and works. She developed her approach in the early 1970s as an antithesis to Conceptual and Minimal Art, but in accordance with the feminist ideas of those days. It was then that she familiarized herself with innovative artistic methods. She created collective works involving specific groups of people and realized projects based on ideas hitherto reserved for anthropology. Susan Hiller uses all sorts of media for her work, ranging from performance, installation, and sculpture to video and sound.

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BAWAG FOUNDATION
Foundationsquartier
Wiedner Hauptstraße 15
A-1040 Vienna