Susan Hiller at Tate Britain

   I stumbled upon the Susan Hiller exhibition at Tate Britain whilst I was there to view the water colour exhibition, she was not an artist that I had heard of before but I decided to have a look. Hiller uses photographs in her work, some she has made herself and some she has found and collected. A lot of her work deals with the past and forgotten people and memories.
    There were two works that interested me the first of which was Monument (1980/81). This piece consists of 41 photographs of plaques on a memorial to London heroes who died trying to save others at the beginning of the twentieth century. These heroes were ordinary people who have since been forgotten everywhere else except by this overgrown monument  and Hiller has decided to bring them to our attention, thereby erasing the forgotten years between. By having their names carved onto these plaques they will 'live' for as long as the monument or Hillers' artwork exists, as Hiller herself states " you can think of life after death as a second life which you enter into as a portrait or inscription, and in which you remain longer than you do in your actual living life."( Hiller 2001 )
     The second artwork that struck me was Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972-1976 ). This work consists of 305 British seaside postcards  whose titles include the phrase ' rough sea ' , she began collecting the postcards firstly because she could not believe that there were so many of them. She also felt they were showed the British acting out their supposed " love affair with lousy weather" ( Susan Hiller cited by Withers 2004 ).
    This work is another kind of memorial, but this time it is Hillers' to the thousands of forgotten photographers and artists who worked to produce these throwaway images.
    Hiller brings to the fore what I think is one of photographies greatest strengths, to bring the past into the present. She does it it a less direct way than normal, by drawing attention to the people behind the images rather than those within them but she does manage to draw you into thinking about the distant past and the very human people who lived it.

Ref: Hiller S, 2001, Biographies @ www.susanhiller.org [ Accessed 26/04/11 ]
       Withers R, 2004, Artworks Susan Hiller @ www. susanhiller. org/info/artworks-RoughSeas. html.