It all starts with a closed book, kept in a white, aseptic shrine, frozen in time; but then the neon light fades away, and the book of the soul unfolds, revealing the dark abyss of a forgotten past.
Susan Hiller exposition at Tate Britain (1 February – 15 May 2011, £10) is a journey into lost identities and the ideology of memory.
Descents into the darkest depths always take move from the easing surface of ordinary life. No wonders the Hiller’s journey starts from a comfortable ordinary-life object: a postcard; or a book, maybe.
Curator Ann Gallagher did a great job by making the visitor at home with the calming, reassuring whiteness of the first exposition halls.
Then the journey gets trickier: the visitor has the chance to either dwell on the reassuring surface or get lost in the side folds of exposition, where moans from the past arise from the dark corners of the past. Private relics, personal mementos, talismans and neglected Victorian plaques to little-known heroes of ordinary life: everything tells about “the ideology of memory, the history of time, the illusion of representation.”
As artist Hiller, 70, puts it, it is just a hopeless stammer, “a discourse full of holes to match a broken world.”
Visitors may think it’s not worth paying £10 to hear a stuttering voice. But getting lost into a tangled, dark forest made of small speakers suspended from the ceiling, each one murmuring with its own voice, is worth alone the pricey ticket.
Just like The Last Silent Movie, Witness is homage to the past: a universe of extinct languages, long-gone people, and forgotten ghosts of the modern consumer society.
“Monuments represent absence: they are metaphor of desire, and regeneration of ideas.” This is why Susan Hiller would have probably appreciated the picture taken from that teenager with her Iphone: following Edgar Lee Masters’ teaching, “we exist forever through our portraits.”
RATING: 4/5
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