Thinking of the Outside – Psychic Archaeology

Thinking of the Outside was an exhibition of ambitious new art works presented in unusual sites across Bristol’s historic city centre in association with Bristol City Council and Picture This. Featuring moving image installations, painting, sculpture and live events Thinking of the Outside offered an intriguing route through the Old City, exploring the relationships between insider and outsider. The education programme was co-ordinated by Arnolfini. 

Susan Hiller, Psychic Archaeology, 2005 (film) 

Psychic Archaeology was a hallucinatory moving-image installation, which investigated the superstitions that surround ethnic and religious stereotypes. The artist’s initial research centred around the history of the Jewish community in 12th and 13th century Bristol, who lived just outside the inner, but within the outer wall of the city, under the protection of the Castle. Hiller combined excerpts from feature films of the 1920s to the present- day with a mesmerising sound-track. 

Susan Hiller 

Since the late 1960s, Hiller has infused conceptual and minimalist strategies and aesthetics with the influence of feminism, popular culture and psychoanalysis, creating works in a diverse range of media: notably sculpture, performance, video, photography, drawing and installation. “To enquire, and to transform” these are the leitmotifs that run throughout Hiller’s oeuvre over a 30 year period, according to curator James Lingwood, who continues, “In a remarkably consistent way, Hiller has sustained an open-ended enquiry into the elusive nature of our selves, the forces at work in the making and re-making of subjectivity and its potential for transformation.” 

Susan Hiller is represented in public collections around the world including the Tate, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Deutsche Bundestag Art Collection, Berlin, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the UBS Collection Zurich. Susan Hiller lives and works in London. 

Situations 

Situations is an art commissioning and research programme which operates from a University base, but produces artworks, events and publications outside the academic context. The programme was initiated in October 2003 by Claire Doherty, who is Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of the West of England, Bristol. From the start, the programme’s guiding principles were to combine the ambition of a commissioning agency model with the critical rigour of an academic research centre. We believe that artists have the capacity to bring something we might never have imagined to a particular place and we are committed to realising those dreams. Curating is far more than project management to us. It is a creative, critical and often passionate undertaking where we seek to understand the best possible means through which to support an artist to make an outstanding work of art in response to a specific situation.