Hexen 2.0 is the new exhibition from British artist Suzanne Treister showing at the Science museum in London. It is a follow up to Hexen 2039 which she showed in 1995. Treister works across media and has produced a large body of work dealing with notions of identity, power, history and the hallucinatory. Hexen 2.0 looks at the collision between science and the arts through cybernetics, the net and shares with the viewer Treister’s fears of governmental and military manipulation.
Treister shows work in several sections, using tarot cards and manipulated photos of the Macy conferences to investigate various manifestations of the manipulation of the human mind. Her most intriguing works however are stylized mind-mapping diagrams with complex titles – From National Socialism via Cybernetics and the Macy Conferences to Neo-Totalitarianism or From MKULTRA via the Counterculture to Technogaianism. These hand-written images are textually heavy and repay careful study in the exhibition catalogue, which also includes an essay by Lars Bang Larsen which sets Treister’s work in context and is a useful introduction for anyone unacquainted with her oeuvre. Indeed there is obviously too much information, too unclearly presented for the artist’s intention to be for the viewer to read everything in the exhibition space. Treister instead aims to visually-overwhelm, creating circular and symmetrical images full of unexpected information that the eye picks at and samples without ever resting. They follow in the tradition of Medieval world maps, delineating a world-view that may or may not be correct, rather like the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral.
Treister is creating a sense of a non-linear history, her drawings purporting to show the interlinking relationships between government agencies and the counter cultures set against them. She focuses on the rarely-mentioned power of the military in democracies and the ways that governments have attempted to control their populations, most notoriously by project MKULTRA – the central core of one of her drawings. Most of the MKULTRA documents have been destroyed, but those that remain make it clear that the CIA were utilising LSD and other drugs in mind control experiments.
Treister’s work can be dense and alarming but it also has a visual sweetness that prevents any theory-overload and makes the whole more alluring than the subject matter may suggest. The Science Museum is an ideal location for the content of this contemporary art show and the book that has been produced by Blackdog publishing is both an archive and ongoing reference library for the many images and ideas that the artist has created.
Hexen 2.0 is a free exhibition running until May 1st 2012 at the Science Museum, South Kensington, London
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