Witness: press coverage

Lend them your ears Sunday Times, 4 June 2000

The Sunday Times, 4 June 2000:
“The chapel has six round windows that have been masked off in ethereal blue. So the show is set in perpetual twilight. When you first walk in, all you hear are waves of whispers. As your eyes grow accustomed to the dark, you see that these are emerging from a forest of 500 loudspeakers suspended from the roof. Moving from speaker to speaker, from testimony to testimony, you listen in on a mass human exodus from sense and factuality. The first witness I heard was a soldier from Yorkshire who was driving out of Skipton one night with his chum, a policeman, when both of them were buzzed by an inexplicable “incandescent glow” that came down over the car.

“The next talker, a hugely entertaining Australian, told of a long drive from Perth to Sydney, during which a cigar-shaped light chased him across the outback and abducted him. Driving around the in the dark appears to be the most reliable way of encountering a UFO. The show has a subsection devoted to the fields of glowing energy that follow you around the house after someone you love has died. Nobody here calls them ghosts.” (Waldemar Januszczak)

Independent Tuesday Review, 23 May 2000:
“...all you can hear is low, indistinguishable babble. You must put your ear very close to the speakers to pick up the individual stories.

“An odd sound phenomenon occurs then. The collective host of voices, and the single voices, seem to be two different things. When you put your ear to one of the speakers, it isn’t – what you’d expect – a homing in, with one voice among the many simply becoming louder and clearer. No, it’s as if you’ve suddenly tuned in to a new voice that wasn’t part of the existing crowd.

“The reason isn’t so odd. The output of each speaker has a very narrow spread. Your ear has to be in its line of fire to catch anything. But the effect is that each speaker, when you lean to it, at once starts speaking directly to you in answer to your listening: a sudden, secret, personal message, like the ones these witnesses claim to have received.” (Tom Lubbock)

The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2000:
“What is so compelling is the earnestness of the testimony, the absolute conviction with which these anonymous, ordinary people tell us of their meetings with men whose skin is blue or metallic, whose craniums are huge and who have slits for eyes, or no mouth. Then for a few electrifying moments, all the voices fall silent except for one who, speaking in English, holds the room spellbound.

“It is as though microphones have a life of their own, as though the people speaking into them belong to a closed circle, a club of believers. The tailor from Yorkshire who saw his UFO in 1979; the man who saw something hovering above Hythe on November 16, 1963; the housewife’s 3am encounter with a 7ft-high alien from a green spaceship that happened to be parked in her street – there is something obsessive about the way that those who have had these experiences endlessly repeat their stories, then politely listen to what a new arrival has to report, before beginning again.” (Richard Dorment)

Make: The Magazine of Women’s Art, September / November 2000:
“It was hard to know where the installation began. In retrospect, even the pilgrimage over there (A - Z in hand, the dwindling summer light, the litter and restless teenagers) seemed part of the experience. Arriving at the chapel – a strange little building, flush with the street and easily missed – one was plunged into darkness. Glowing red at the far end was a spiral staircase that enticed you upstairs into further dimness and the core of the work. With spectral delicacy and sonority, the vision and sound of hundreds of dangling speakers drew you across the room.

“One could circle the work or wade in through the voices. The fade and swell of the testimonies was utterly captivating. A balance between credibility and disbelief in the visitor was held taut by the earnest tone of the speakers. But it was the architecture of the chapel in which it was staged that encouraged a great onrush of ideas: the roles of religions, the articulability of trauma, the displacement of fantasy, the desire for abduction, the similarity of alien sightings and religious visions, their respective status in society, etc.

"The flood of correspondences brought about by interaction with the setting added untold depth to Hiller’s ideas. Given the dignity of solitary placement in a once-functioning monument, Witness demanded concentration and involvement from the viewer, and in return actively fuelled our thoughts.” (Claire Bishop)

Art and Christianity Enquiry Bulletin, October 2000:
“The installation concerned sightings of UFOs, and comprised a darkened room full of dozens of small loud-speakers hung from their flexes, out of which could be heard a cacophony of voices from throughout the world describing various kinds of ‘close encounter’. The location and the subject seemed in perfect harmony, for what Hiller was addressing was surely the desire for transcendental experience, and how this desire has been weirdly transformed within secular society. Indeed, Hiller has been addressing in a quasi-anthropological fashion just such phenomena since the 1970s, and it has taken until now for her concerns to be echoed more broadly within art practice.” (Simon Morley)

The Guardian, 04 May, 2004:
“Standing outside this dangling world, with its sizzle of tinny voices, one views it almost as a model of some sort. Walk among the earphones and one is transported. The stories themselves matter less than their cumulative effect, the fact that these people believed what happened to them. There is something lonely and lost about these accounts, this wish for the stories to be believed.” (Adrian Searle - read full article)