Collection: Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller (1940–2019) was an American-born British artist whose work drew on anthropology, psychoanalysis, popular culture and the paranormal to examine what official culture excludes, suppresses or refuses to take seriously. Working across installation, video, photography, painting and artists’ books, she investigated automatic writing, dreams, collective memory, alien abduction testimony, near-death experiences and the residues of destroyed cultures. Works such as Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–76), which collected and systematised hundreds of British seaside postcards depicting rough seas, and From the Freud Museum (1991–96), which repackaged archaeological and cultural fragments as museum specimens, used the formats of institutional classification to expose the limits of rational knowledge. Hiller was a significant and consistently underrecognised figure in British art from the 1970s until her death.