SUSAN HILLER
Witness

16 May – 25 June 2000
The Chapel, 92 Golborne Road, London W10

“I am a security guard on the Central Pier in Blackpool. I want to keep my job, so I will not give out my name. Around 2 am on February 24, suddenly I felt the main pier rattle and vibrate as if struck by a very heavy swell – yet the tide was out. This was .a very strong physical sensation. I rushed outside and saw a ball of orange light over the sea to the south. It shot into the distance incredibly fast, making a roaring noise, and then it vanished north-westwards. There was a lingering smell, a bit like ozone.

About 30 minutes later, I gazed in complete amazement as a series of white lights climbed up from the Irish Sea. These lights then spiralled in unison in an organised formation, into the clouds and disappeared from my sight. The lights were separate from each other and incredibly bright. The whole experience left me with a sense of wonder and amazement”.

People see strange things. Lights in the sky, mysterious phenomena, visions and visitations – things they can’t explain but know they saw.

Susan Hiller has been collecting stories of these sightings for years. Some of them are prosaic and descriptive, like legal testimony. Others are visionary and marvelling. All of them are facts...

Located in a disused Baptist chapel off Portobello Road in West London, Witness was a major work about seeing and believing. Hiller invited us to explore the area where rational systems of explaining things no longer seem to hold.
Witness gave a quietly unsettling new form to Hiller’s ongoing fascination with the paranormal.

One of Britain’s outstanding contemporary artists, Hiller’s early work received critical acclaim at the Whitechapel’s survey of British conceptual art, ‘Live in Your Head’, and her installation ‘From the Freud Museum’ featured in the opening exhibition at Tate Modern at Bankside.
Witness went on from the Chapel to be shown in ‘Intelligence’ at Tate Britain.