'Visual Echoes' featuring Susan Hiller at Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria
19 September 2025
From 2 October 2025 — 8 March 2026 Museum der Moderne presents ‘Visual Echoes: Counter-Images in the Stream of Pictures’, featuring Susan Hiller. The exhibition presents five large-scale installations incorporating video, film, and photography that engage with the power of media images and the mechanisms of collective visual memory. Using found footage or culturally embedded visual motifs, the artists reference diverse mediascapes spanning analog and digital media, television, cinema, the internet, social networks, advertising, politics, and art. They examine how visual content shapes perception, influences emotion, and forms collective remembrance.
By reflecting on the affective, ideological, and power-laden structures sedimented in today’s image flows, the works propose alternative visual orders. Meaning arises not through linear narrative but through friction, associative montage, mirroring, omission, or formal condensation. As critical visual echoes, the installations challenge dominant visual regimes—with their own rhythms, poetic ruptures, and political acuity. They generate counter-images that engage not only the intellect, but also speak to viewers emotionally and physically. These works create experiential spaces in which our collective image memory is renegotiated—and the act of seeing itself is questioned.
In Psi Girls (1999), presented as part of this exhibition, Hiller manipulated clips from five Hollywood movies featuring adolescent girls performing telekinetic feats. The video installation is presented as a row of five projections, each tinted with a different fluorescent hue. At first silent, the clips are joined halfway through by the pulsating, seductive rhythm of a gospel choir that heightens in volume and intensity. The effect is increasingly immersive and distinctly unsettling, suggestive of a regressive cultural fascination with and fear of young womanhood and its disruptive potential. The rhythmic soundtrack encourages a dreamlike daze, only to abruptly shock viewers into a state of distanced scrutiny with the sudden intrusion of ‘white noise’. The work’s formal properties accentuate the artificiality of special effects and their potency to move us along a spectrum between belief and disbelief. The piece demonstrates that what we know to be illusory still contains the power to mesmerise and capture the imagination.
Find out more via Museum der Moderne.
Image: Installation view: Susan Hiller: Paraconceptual at Lisson Gallery, New York, 28 April – 10 June 2017 © Susan Hiller. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
