Susan Hiller. Lost and Found

30.10.2026 – 31.01.2027 Susan Hiller. Lost and Found

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Andrew Price

An icon of British conceptualism in Warsaw.

Lost and Found is the first institutional survey exhibition of American-born British artist Susan Hiller (1940-2019) in Poland. Hiller was one of the most influential artists of her generation. The range of her artistic materials and media, her eclectic personal obsessions and interests, and the ideas and themes that she committed to exploring over a career of five decades continue to have an extraordinary relevance today. While honouring the multiplicity of her work, the exhibition ‘Lost and Found’ highlights her signature practice of collecting cultural artefacts – from the everyday to the esoteric – and transforming them into compelling works of art exploring limits of language, memory, perception, belief, and imagination.

Postcards and dreams, séances and systems of classification, the human aura and a box of desert fossils, automatic writings and bedroom wallpapers, trance states and clips from Hollywood movies, collections of intangible things like shadows and collections of tangible things like toy plastic animals – all these items are artefacts that I've worked with.

– Susan Hiller

Hiller famously abandoned her early training in anthropology to become an artist. Rather than studying other cultures from the outside as a supposedly ‘objective’ observer, she chose to explore her own culture from within. Driven by a fascination with language and artefacts, she developed a practice of collecting found materials that were commonly overlooked, forgotten, or marginalised, and sourced from gift shops, archaeological sites, tabloid news, popular cinema, museum archives and, in her late career, the internet. Hiller recognised that certain artefacts can express cultural assumptions, contradictions, and conflicts. Through assembling many variations into series, lists or grids, her artworks uncover latent meanings that unsettle our habitually fixed notions of ‘self’ and ‘reality’. In that respect, Hiller’s work across video, photography, painting, sound and installation has been described as ‘an archaeology of the cultural unconscious.’

The exhibition begins with her career-spanning conceptual investigations into British ‘Rough Seas’ postcards made by anonymous female workers (Addenda to Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1976 to On the Edge, 2015), followed by Wild Talents, a multichannel video commissioned by Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery in 1997, which through movie clips explores our enduring fascination with the supernatural and the perceived disruptive power of youth. The middle section presents powerful projects on disappearance and absence: The J. Street Project (Index), a monumental installation of photographs documenting every street sign in Germany bearing the prefix ‘Juden’; and Lost and Found, 2016 – giving this exhibition its name – a single channel audiovisual montage of audio recordings of people speaking, singing, and storytelling in extinct, endangered and revived languages, retrieved from linguistic and anthropological archives.

The exhibition ends with Die gedanken sind frei, 2012 – an interactive installation of 100 popular songs, collected over the period of one year, drawn from different cultures, movements, and eras, sharing fundamental human themes of justice, resistance, displacement, and freedom. Together, the selected artworks demonstrate the extraordinary multiplicity of Hiller’s work, offering experiences that range from the deeply meditative to the ecstatic. Through her singular ‘methodical-methodological approach’, Hiller challenged conventional understandings of what art and artistic material can be—inviting us to look at ourselves and the world around us with renewed curiosity, imagination, and critical thought.

Artist biography

With a multimedia practice extending over 50 years, Susan Hiller was one of the most influential artists of her generation. 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. Susan Hiller (1940-2019) was born in Tallahasse, Florida. After graduating from Smith College in 1961, she went on to do doctoral studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science Foundation fellowship. However she abandoned anthropology to become an artist, and from the mid ‘60s was based mainly in London. Her career has been recognised by major solo and survey exhibitions at institutions including Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2025); Kunsthaus Biel Centre d'art Bienne, Switzerland (2025); Museo Helga de Alvear, Caćeres, Spain (2024); Bloomberg SPACE, London, UK (2020); The Polygon, Vancouver, Canada (2018); Officine Grande Riparazioni, Turin, Italy (2018); Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, USA (2017); The Model, Sligo, Ireland (2014); Samstag Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark (2014); Summerhall, Edingburgh, UK (2014); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Toulouse, France (2014); Tate Britain, London, UK (2011); Kunstalle Nurnberg, Germany (2011); Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2010); BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, Austria (2008); The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, USA (2008); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2006); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2005); Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2004); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark (2002); Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway (1999); ICA, Philadelphia, PA, USA (1998); Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK (1996); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK (1989); and ICA, London, UK (1986). She participated in Documenta 13 and 14, Kassel, Germany (2012, 2017); Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); and in British Art Shows 2, 5 and 8, touring, UK (1984, 2000, 2015). Hiller’s work features in numerous international private and public collections including Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’art Bienne, Switzerland; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA; Tate Collection, London, UK; Seralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; and Centro de Arte Contemporanea Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil.

Curator biography

Andrew Price is an independent curator based in London. Having worked as studio assistant to Susan Hiller in her final years, and subsequently working alongside Gabriel Coxhead (Director, Estate of Susan Hiller) in an Artist Manager role at Lisson Gallery, Price curated Hiller’s first posthumous survey exhibition. Accompanied by a new publication, Dedicated to the Unknown premiered at Museo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Spain (2024), before touring to Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2025). In addition to his work as an Artist Liaison across the gallery sector, Price curates exhibitions and live programming for non-profit arts organisations, artist-run spaces, and commercial galleries. He holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London (2019) and a BA in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins (2014).