© Susan Hiller

From the Freud Museum

Susan Hiller’s archive of objects and texts is intended to explore ‘what’s unspoken, unrecorded, unexplained and overlooked… the unconscious of culture’.

From the Freud Museum (1991-6) developed from an earlier work which Hiller exhibited at the former London home of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. She was intrigued by the rare classical and ethnographic art and artefacts that filled Freud’s house, and assembled her own alternative collection of cultural ephemera and personal mementos. She describes them as ‘worthless artefacts and materials – rubbish, discards, fragments, trivia and reproductions – which seemed to carry an aura of memory and to hint at meaning something’.

Hiller’s archive is arranged in carefully-labelled archaeological collecting boxes, which highlight the act of excavating, salvaging, sorting, naming and preserving. As Hiller points out, these processes are intrinsic to archaeology and psychoanalysis, but also to the making of art. She suggests that viewers should spend time with the work, making their own connections between each box and the rest of the display. ‘It’s got a dreamlike quality because dreams link together things which on the surface don’t appear to be very similar’, she has said. ‘Double meanings, puns, mysteries, unresolved feelings, things that are normally suppressed and not dealt with are all there for people to discover and find out for themselves. So the viewer is in the role either of a detective or of a psychoanalyst.’

Susan Hiller was born in 1940 in the USA. She lives and works in London.

Text by Catherine Kinley