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"Hiller was influenced by the visual language of Minimalism and Conceptual art [6] and later cited Minimalism, Fluxus, Surrealism and her study of anthropology as major influences on her work

Over the course of her career, Hiller became known for making use of everyday phenomena and cultural artefacts from our society,[10] drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as postcards, dreams, automatic writing, archives, Punch & Judy shows, UFO sightings, horror movies and narratives.

Using the techniques of collecting and cataloguing, presentation and display, she transformed these everyday pieces of ephemera into art works that offer a means of exploring the inherent contradictions in our collective cultural life, as well as the individual and collective unconscious and subconscious.

she was interested in the areas of our cultural collective experience that are concerned with devalued or irrational experiences: the subconscious, the supernatural, the surreal, the mystical and the paranormal. She engaged with such experiences and phenomena which defy logical or rational explanation through the rational scientific techniques of taxonomy, collection, organization, description and comparison. She did not, however, apply systems of judgment to the work, refraining from ever categorising the experiences as 'true' or 'false', 'fact' or 'fiction'

Hiller described her practice as 'paraconceptual' a neologism that places her work between the conceptual and the paranormal. Many of her works explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing

Beginning in the 1980s, Hiller incorporated the use of audio and visual technology as a means of investigating these phenomena, allowing the visitor to 'make visions from ambiguous aural and visual cues"

Susan Hiller - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Susan_Hiller

Since first making innovative use of audio and visual technology in the early 1980s, her groundbreaking installations, multi-screen videos and audio works have achieved international recognition. Each of Hiller’s works is based on specific cultural artefacts from our society, which are used as basic materials. Many pieces explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79), near death experiences (Channels, 2013) and collective experiences of unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity (Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983-4; Psi Girls, 1999; Witness, 2000). Hiller’s powerful and resonant films range from the J Street Project(2002-05), a chillingly extensive search for every street sign in Germany bearing the word Juden (Jew), to The Last Silent Movie(2007), which also documents disappearance and absence, although this time through speech recordings of dying or extinct languages. Her psychologically charged and thematically varied practice amounts to an impassioned plea for the joys and mysteries associated with irrationality.

https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/susan-hiller

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