Thursday, February 9, 2012

Installation: Witness


Witness by Susan Hiller
On exhibit at Hiller's solo show at the Tate Britain.

"Witness" is an instillation featuring scores of small speakers hanging from the ceiling. They play recordings in various languages of eyewitness accounts of UFO landings, filling the room with dream-like voices. Jonathan Jones describes the exhibit in an article for the Guardian:
Entering the upper room of the chapel you see a multitude of little loudspeakers hanging on wires. A babble of voices talk at once, muttering like the voices of the dead or the legion of the damned. It is called Witness, but the sounds are blurred in this scary hive of noise, which is cinematic in its creation of atmosphere but also glib in a Hollywood way; we are encouraged not to listen to the details but to soak up the background hum. Put your ear to a speaker and an Australian is describing something odd he and his mates encountered. Leave him, the hum gets louder, and a girl from Spain is telling an equally eerie

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