The Dream Seminar II
Visiting Professor Susan Hiller
Fondazione Antonio Ratti
Villa Sucota, Via Cernobbio 19
22100 Como
p. +39 031 233216
[email protected]
http://www.fondazioneratti.org
Advanced Course in Visual Arts“The Dream Seminar II”Susan Hiller will be the visiting professor. The artist has been living and working in Britain for more than thirty years, where she became known for an innovative artistic practice excavating the overlooked or ignored aspects of our cultu¬re. Hiller has adopted and combined media in ways radical for their time and she is acknowledged as an important influence on younger generations of artists.
Hiller cites Minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of Surrealism, anthropology and femi¬nism as influences on her unique practice. She juxtaposes knowledge derived from anthropology, psychoanalysis and other scientific disciplines with materials genera¬lly considered unimportant, like postcards, wallpaper, popular movies and stories of UFO sightings, balancing the familiar and the unexplained and inviting the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning. She collects and uses images, objects and sounds to create new contexts, incorpora¬ting traces of memory, history, and personal allusions. Her practice often investigates subconscious processes, including drea¬ming, reverie, automatic writing and impro¬vised vocalizations. Privileging the repres¬sed, forgotten or unknown, Hiller analyzes, recontextualizes and confers status on what lies outside or beneath recognition.
“The Dream Seminar II” will be modelled on a project of mine from the early 1970s, and is subtitled “an investigation into the source of images and ideas”. Participants will be asked to keep dream notebooks and to read several texts which approach the dream from a variety of unusual perspectives. They will be expected to participate in intensive group workshops focusing on individual dreams. There will be occasional lectures, discussing, analyzing and illustrating the relationship between dreams and image making in diverse socie¬ties around the world. A collective work or proposal for a work may emerge from these experiences.” (Susan Hiller)
A scientific commission will select 20 participating artists on the basis of the presented portfolios. The artists will be engaged in daily activities related to the reflection and practice of their activity. Seminars and public lectures held by international experts will deepen the theme of the course.
The Foundation produces an exhibition of the visiting professor and offers the young artists the possibility to publicly exhibit their works during the course.
The Advanced Course in Visual Arts is free of charge. Accommodation and travel expenses are not covered. An open call, published on the new website http://www.fondazioneratti.org, includes the application procedure. The application must be consigned by 8 April 2011; the selected participants will be contacted via email by 30 April 2011.
Susan Hiller was born in the USA in 1949 and has lived and worked in Britain since 1970s. One-person exhibitions of Susan Hiller’s work were held at Tate, London; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Joy Art Gallery, Beijing; Kunsthalle, Basel; Kunst-Raum des Deutschen Bundestages, Berlin; Museu Serralves, Porto; Fondacion Mendoza, Caracas and other public institu¬tions.
Hiller has explored the intersections of me¬mory, history and the unacknowledged in a number of publications. Her talks and in¬terviews have been collected in two books: The Provisional Texture of Reality, publis¬hed by JRP Ringier in 2008 and Thinking about Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, published by Manchester University Press in 1996. She is the author of The J.street Project published by the DAAD and Comp¬ton Verney Trust, 2005 and After the Freud Museum, published by Bookworks Press in 1995, reprinted 2000.
Fondazione Antonio Ratti
Villa Sucota, Via Cernobbio 19
22100 Como
p. +39 031 233216
[email protected]
new website http://www.fondazioneratti.org
