Susan Hiller is widely regarded as one of the most influential women artists of her generation, as well as a pioneer of installation and multimedia art.
Born in the USA, she made London her home in the late 1960s, where she became a key voice in the nascent counter-culture and feminist movements. Her practice spanned a broad range of media including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books and writing. Her work often took for its subject aspects of culture that were overlooked, marginalised, or disregarded – which in turn spoke to issues of gender, class and politics.
After graduating from Smith College, Massachusetts, in 1961, Hiller pursued doctoral studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, conducting fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. However, she became uncomfortable with academic anthropology's claim to objectivity; she wrote that she did not wish her research to become part of anthropology's “objectification of the contrariness of lived events”.
During a lecture on African art, she made the decision to abandon anthropology to become an artist. She lived in France, Morocco, Wales and India with her husband, the writer David Coxhead, before settling in London, where she made that very ‘contrariness of lived events’ the basis of her practice, focussing on the products of our society – our dreaming through commodities – that are often overlooked, ignored, or repressed.
As John Roberts has written:
‘All Hiller’s work should rightly be discussed… as a process of mapping: the mapping of the self, of cultural formations, of the boundaries between forms, of language itself.’
Hiller's work features in numerous international private and public collections including the Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, London; British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Norway, Oslo; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporañea, Brumadinho, Brazil.