Susan Hiller

Lost and Found is the first institutional survey exhibition of American-born British artist Susan Hiller (1940-2019) in Poland, continuing until 31 January 2027.

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art
pl. Małachowskiego 3
00-916 Warsaw

Exhibition Continues: 30 October 2026 - 31 January 2027
Tuesday - Sunday, 12-8pm
Thursday - free entry

The exhibition highlights Hiller's 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.