Susan Hiller. Lost, found

Zachęta — National Gallery of Art

curated by: Andrew Price

An icon of British conceptualism in Warsaw.

Susan Hiller (1940—2019), a U.S.-born British artist, was one of the most influential artists of her generation. For more than five decades she has been interested in what remains on the fringes of everyday experience — forgotten images and stories, marginal phenomena, languages, beliefs and traces of collective memory. In her artistic practice, collecting cultural artifacts allowed her to see unexpected connections between seemingly incompatible elements and place them in new contexts. It was from this fascination that Hiller's very diverse work grew, encompassing photography, painting, film, sound and installation. Her work raises questions about memory, language, perception, beliefs and imagination — topics that remain relevant even today. Lost, Found is the first institutional cross-sectional exhibition of her work in Poland.

“Postcards and dreams, spiritualistic seances and classification systems, human aura and box of desert fossils, automatic writing and bedroom wallpapers, trance states and clips from Hollywood movies, collections of elusive things like shadows and tangible objects like plastic toy animals—all artifacts I've worked with” (Susan Hiller).

As is well known, Hiller abandoned anthropology to pursue art. Instead of studying other cultures from the outside as a supposedly “objective” observer, she chose to explore her own culture from the inside. Fascinated by language and artifacts, she developed the practice of collecting material that is usually overlooked, marginalized, or forgotten; sourcing it from gift shops, archaeological sites, tabloids, popular cinema, museum archives, and, at the end of her career, from the Internet. She believed that certain artifacts could be an expression of cultural assumptions, contradictions and conflicts. She juxtaposed their various variants in series, lists, or grids to reveal hidden meanings that challenge our habitual, established understandings of our own “I” and “reality.” For this reason, Hiller's work in the areas of video, photography, painting, sound and installation is referred to as “the archeology of the cultural subconscious”.

The exhibition begins with a conceptual exploration of the artist's entire work, centred around the British postcards from the Rough Seas series, performed by anonymous female employees (from Addenda to Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1976, to On the Edge, 2015). Another work is Wild Talents, a multi-channel video commissioned by Warsaw's Foksal Gallery in 1997. In a series of video clips, the artist looked at our unchanging fascination with the supernatural and perceived as a destructive force of youth. In the next part of the exhibition we present two suggestive works on the theme of disappearance and absence. The J. Street Project (Index) is a monumental installation made from photographs documenting all road signs in Germany that bear the prefix “Juden”. Lost and Found from 2016, from which the title of the exhibition is derived, is a single-channel audiovisual montage made up of recordings obtained from linguistic and anthropological archives, in which people speak, sing and tell stories in languages that are extinct, threatened with extinction and reconstructed. The exhibition ends with an interactive installation entitled Die gedanken sind frei from 2012. It consists of 100 popular songs, collected in one year and drawn from different cultures, movements and eras, centering around fundamental issues such as justice, resistance, displacement and freedom. The works put together show the diversity of the artist's work and provide a variety of reception experiences, from deeply meditative to ecstatic. With her unique “methodological-methodological approach,” Hiller challenged the conventional understanding of what art or artistic material could be; at the same time, her work encourages us to look at ourselves and the world around us with new curiosity, imagination and criticism.

Biographical note of the artist

Susan Hiller, whose multimedia work spanned more than 50 years, was one of the most influential artists of her generation. Since her first innovative use of audiovisual technology in the early 1980s, her installations, multi-screen film projections and sound work have gained international recognition. Each of the artist's works is based on specific cultural artifacts taken from our social life, used as source material. Many works explore the liminality of certain phenomena, such as automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79), the experience of rubbing oneself against death (Channels, 2013), and the collective experience of the action of the subconscious, the unconscious, and the paranormal (Belshazzar's Feast, 1983—1984; Psi Girls, 1999; Witness, 2000). Her highly influential films include J. Street Project (2002—2005) — documenting a large-scale search for road signs with the prefix “Juden” in Germany, and The Last Silent Movie (2007), a work also documenting disappearance and absence, in this case through recordings of speech in extinct or already extinct languages. Hiller's work, marked by a huge psychological charge and devoted to diverse subjects, is a passionate appeal for the joy and mystery of the irrational.

Susan Hiller (1940—2019) was born in Tallahasse, Florida. In 1961, she graduated from Smith College and then received her doctorate in anthropology from Tulane University in New Orleans, as part of a National Science Foundation fellowship. Over time, she abandoned anthropology in favor of creative work, and from the mid-60s she worked mainly in London. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and review exhibitions at institutions such as Culturgest, Lisbon (2025), Kunsthaus Biel Centre d'art Bienne (2025), Museo Helga de Alvear, Caćeres (2024), Bloomberg SPACE, London (2020), The Polygon, Vancouver (2018), Officine Grande Riparazioni, Turin (2018), Pérez Art Museum Miami (2017), The Model, Sligo (2014), Samstag Foundation, Copenhagen (2014), Summerhall, Edinburgh (2014), Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Toulouse (2014), Tate Britain, London (2011), Kunstalle Nürnberg (2011), Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz (2010), BAWAG Foundation, Vienna (2008), The Jewish Museum, New York (2008), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2006), Kunsthalle Basel (2005), Museu Serralves, Porto (2004), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde (2002), Henioff E-Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (1999), ICA, Philadelphia (1998), Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1996), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1989) and ICA, London (1986). She has participated in exhibitions such as Documenta 13 and 14 in Kassel (2012, 2017), Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016) and in British Art Shows 2, 5 and 8 (1984, 2000, 2015), shown in several cities of the United Kingdom. Hiller's work is in numerous international collections, both public and private, including the Musée d'art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva, Kunsthaus Biel Centre d'art Bienne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate Collection in London, Seralves Foundation in Porto and Centro de Arte Contemporanea Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil.

Curator's biographical note

Andrew Price is an independent curator based in London. He worked as an assistant in Susan Hiller's studio in the last years of her life and then, as artist manager at Lisson Gallery, in collaboration with Gabriel Coxhead (director of the estate management organization after Susan Hiller), curated the first posthumous review exhibition dedicated to the artist. The exhibition, Dedicated to the Unknown and its accompanying publication, premiered at the Museo Helga de Alvear in Cáceres, Spain (2024); it was then presented at Culturgest in Lisbon (2025). Price also curates exhibitions and live events for arts non-profit organizations, artist-run spaces, and commercial galleries. He received a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) with a degree in Curatorship from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2019), and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Culture, Criticism and Curatorship from Central Saint Martins College (2014).

Organized in cooperation with:
Estate of Susan Hiller, Lisson Gallery and Museum of Art in Łódź, with the support of the British Council.

Thank you will be willing to accept:
Gabriel Coxhead, Mariana Fantich, Mariya Rylskaya and Sarah Willis.

Partner of the exhibition:

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