Barbara Einzig, Thinking about art : conversations with Susan Hiller, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996
→Alexandra Kokoli M. (ed.), The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977-2007, Zurich, JRP/ Ringier, 2008
→Susan Hiller, exh. cat. Tate Britain Modern, London, 1 February – 15 May 2011, London, Tate Publishing, 2011
Susan Hiller, Tate Britain, London, 1 February – 15 May 2011, London
→Susan Hiller, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 23 May – 31 August 2014
American photographer and visual artist.
After studying anthropology (among other subjects) at Tulane University in New Orleans, Susan Hiller started working as an anthropologist before she obtained her PhD in 1965. She started experimenting with happenings and collective actions, and in 1972 performed her series Hand Grenades, in which she set her own paintings on fire. Following this attack on painting, which she carried out as a sort of ritual, she proceeded to define her work method, which consists of making inventories of the visual forms at her disposal while cross-referencing several other disciplines – ethnography, art history – and using several mediums at once – photography and film. Memory, psychology, storytelling and iconography constitute her main lines of research, in which she simultaneously assumes the figures of the artist, critic, and ethnologist to explore her relationship to the world. Her work is featured in a large number of public collections and a retrospective of her work was held at Tate Liverpool in 1996. Dedicated to the Unknown Artist (1972-1976), one of her best known pieces, is the first in a series of works for which she collected tourist postcards featuring waves. In an interview with Roger Malbert (2007), she explained that what interested her was the relationship between the captions and the pictures. For her, the “unknown artists” who print out these colourful pictures are women. With this series, she used the vocabulary and method of presentation of minimalist and conceptual art, and combined it with Pop art aesthetics.