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Susan Hiller Internationally acclaimed artist Susan Hiller's most recent video installation, Psi Girls, consists of five floor-to-ceiling projections exploring the relationship between 'magic' and 'art', using excerpts from popular cinema collected, sampled and manipulated by Hiller over several years. Psi Girls focuses on one specific theme of adolescence and late childhood as represented in the mass media - the unpredictability and threat of spontaneous, unfocused special abilities in children, particularly girls. The work investigates our common understanding of what is possible, and our desires and fantasies of what we wish were possible, using popular film as cultural artefact. Psi Girls has been sampled from five previously unconnected films in which young women are represented in altered states of consciousness, and empowered with extraordinary and unsettling telekinetic skills. The physical nature of the work responds to the physical powers portrayed – powers of moving, manipulating, controlling and playing. The soundtrack, featuring the rhythmic hand-clapping and drumming of a gospel choir, seems to physically 'drive the rhythm of the brain', whilst the vibrantly coloured images absorb and surround the viewer. The flow of colours and images is intended to provoke a meditation not only on the original subject matter (children and magic powers), but on the magic of the visual and the magic of art. Susan Hiller was born in Florida, USA. After completing
a PhD in anthropology, Hiller studied art in Paris and Provence in the
late 1960s before settling in London in 1973. Solo exhibitions include
retrospective surveys at the ICA, London, 1986 and the Tate, Liverpool,
1996. Group exhibitions include Rites of Passage, Tate Gallery, London,
1995, Sydney Biennale 1997 and the 1998 Adelaide Festival, Australia.
She will have solo exhibitions this year in Caracas, Oslo, London and
the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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