Susan Hiller: an artist who chased ghosts – and took no prisoners

Her multimedia artworks dwelt on the persistence of the past and the phantoms of cultural anxiety, entertaining, challenging and terrifying viewers

You never knew what Susan Hiller was going to do next, and I sometimes think neither did she. Experiments in automatic writing, burning all her paintings, creating a museum collection of detritus, communicating with the dead. Her art was not programmatic, but driven by curiosity and an alertness to her surroundings.

She recognised that what an artist does happens in the context of place, and society, and the culture in which she finds herself. Hiller’s training as an anthropologist sharpened her view and provided something of her methodology, such as it was. She mistrusted objectivity. In her art, in her curating and in her teaching, she was full of curiosity, insight, integrity, humour and irony.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FWRrn3