Susan Hiller (1940–2019)

Created for the Freud Museum in 1994 as part of Book Works multi-site project, Susan Hiller’s great work After the Freud Museum, has been a remarkable popular and critical success wherever it has been shown. At MoMA it was exhibited alongside work by Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp and Fluxus. Sophie Calle and Claes Oldenburg, two other artists with whom the Freud Museum has collaborated, also took part in this show.

‘…This book is a portable museum and one that could provoke a hundred show more novels…if this is free association, it is of a high order, drawing together mythology, anthropology, modern history, science, superstition, religion, comedy and tragedy − and spiky humour.’ − Art Monthly

This book is a companion to Susan Hiller at the Freud Museum, an installation that was originally commissioned by Book Works. Hiller’s witty and erudite commentary is a response to Sigmund Freud’s astonishing personal collection of art and antiquities, his library, his consulting room (including the famous couch) at his last home, in London. The book presents a series of archaeological collection boxes, and through turning the pages the reader embarks on a personal journey that discloses the secrets of each box.

It was shown from March to June 1999 in The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, an exhibition at MoMA. She had developed the piece over 5 years so that it grew to encompass 50 boxes, and in 1998 it was purchased by the Tate Gallery for their permanent collection.

Susan Hiller wrote in the catalogue:

“On one level, my vitrine installation is a collection of things evoking cultural and historical points of slippage – psychic, ethnic, sexual, and political disturbances. Individual items in my collection range from macabre through sentimental to banal. Many of the objects are personal, things I’ve kept for years as private relics and talismans, mementoes, references to unresolved issues in earlier works, or even as jokes. Sigmund Freud’s impressive collection of classical art and artefacts inspired me to formalise and focus my project. But if Freud’s collection is a kind of index to the version of Western civilisation’s heritage he was claiming, then my collection taken as a whole, is an archive of misunderstandings, crises, and ambivalences that complicate any such notion of heritage.”



Susan Hiller is an artist who makes collections. Her art is curatorial in that it assembles, preserves and documents. What she collects are what she calls “cultural artefacts” […] What is brilliant and original about Susan Hiller is the way she has turned her anthropological eye on to what is familiar […] Hiller’s art seems increasing about the unconscious of our culture, the margins of the collective psyche

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian show less

Dreams: Visions of the Night is a good starting point for getting a little more in depth into dream theory. It has introductions to the different traditions of belief of dreams (Greek, Christian, Psychoanalytic), and a lot of interesting pictures of dream paraphernalia from different traditions.

Dream Machines takes up the theme of the transformative power of art, presenting works that propose the possibility of shifting the viewer's consciousness to induce reverie, hallucination, or transcendence. International and cross-generational, this book includes daily dream drawings, dream paintings, and real-life "dream machines," as well as photography, sound, video, and installation work that engage with mediumship and trance, intoxication, hypnosis, and out-of-body experience. Selected show more by the artist Susan Hiller and operating in the territory covered by her own work, Dream Machines is the latest in a series of exhibitions curated by distinguished artists. show less

Susan Hiller's contribution to documenta13. She collected a juke box full of songs about freedom and supression, about struggle, anarchy, underdogs, revolution and subversion. The subtitle tells it all: Die Gedanken sind frei. Our thoughts are free, no one can control the things you think. I love the incredibly optimistic faith in the power and sovereignity of the individual mind: "Die Gedanken sind frei (..) Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschiessen."