Susana Hiller

Susan Hiller was born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1940. She lives and works mainly in London. The witness and the archive—two major issues in modern history which have become themes in much contemporary art—were engaged with very early on by Susan Hiller. Between them, a lacuna opens in which the sayable gives way to the unsayable, and back again. In a sense, this transaction is the core of Hiller’s practice.

Certain experiences are barely translatable into language. Forgetting, loss and speechlessness are part of the dynamic of these recollections, whose omissions and errors are accepted and transmuted through Hiller’s process of creating artworks.

Hiller’s J. Street Project is a film, a book, and a series of 303 photographs based on three years of travelling in Germany in search of all the streets, lanes, and country roads whose names contain the word ‘Jude’ (Jew). Hiller thus created a new kind of archive, an archive of traces, based on a personal account and devised precisely as incomplete in order to render visible a truly existing and poignant lacuna.