Ahead of a major autumn survey at Modern Art Oxford, Suzanne Treister is showing a new series of works, Hexen 5.0, together with a selection of her visionary Museum paintings at Annely Juda in London. HEXEN 5.0 is a collection of tarot cards, diagrams and AI-prompted works that reimagine the visual language of alchemical drawings of the 13th – 18th centuries. Building on her earlier series – HEXEN 2.0 (2009-2011) – which critically analysed government programmes of mass control, HEXEN 5.0 addresses the cli mate emergency and looks at fields which may lead to better solutions for returning the planet towards a self-regulating system.
Your combination of interests is unusual. How would you describe it?
Well I am always trying to understand the relationships between everything. I suppose I have a holistic tendency. I like to try and understand the bigger picture, and at the same time to explore boundaries between science, mysticism, technology and society, for example.
How do the different types of work at Annely Juda fit together?
HEXEN 5.0 is a separate new project in the front gallery, consisting of diagrams, Tarot and AI works, whereas the Museum paintings in the rear gallery are components of different projects, from Survivor (F) (2016-19) and The Escapist Black Hole Spacetime (2018-19) to Kabbalistic Futurism (2021-23); and there is a new work from HEXEN 5.0, called the Museum of Spiritual Earth System Science, which bridges the gap between the two.
The ‘HEXEN 5.0’ project operates as both a conceptual whole and as a set of individual works that each contain a tremendous amount of information. Could you say something about how you see the ‘conceptual whole’ operating?
Yes, HEXEN 5.0, which is an update of HEXEN 2.0 (2011), presents a critical and historical exploration of new global developments in terrestrial and interplanetary technologies, science and communications, corporate and governmental forces, the ecosystem and climate crisis, recent and traditional fields of knowledge and spirituality, new branches of bio/socio/political theory, contemporary countercultural and futuristic movements, new directions in science-fiction, and proposed possible solutions for an ethical survival of the human race.
Where HEXEN 2.0 analysed the legacy of cybernetics as embodied in Web 2.0 and systems of control, showing how Web 2.0 works as a societal controlling system, HEXEN 5.0 traces cybernetics’ relevance to whole earth systems. It shows the cybernetic self-regulating feedback loops of the planetary ecosystem, which we have sent out of whack, should be addressed through an understanding of the workings of the total global ecosystem. This is embodied in the aims of the recent new field, Earth System Science, and potentially in an even more holistic system incorporating traditional knowledges and spirituality. Hence my invention of the Museum of Spiritual Earth System Science.
How can the viewer best trace a path from the overall diagrams to groups of tarot works and the individual works within them?
The subject of each of the 78 tarot works is to be found in one or more of the diagrams. Studying the diagrams reveals interrelationships between these subjects and allows for greater understanding of a bigger picture. When the deck is published later this year it will enable group readings and discussions, and hopefully inspire new ideas and visions for positive alternative futures.
Queen of Pentacles – Surveillance Capitalism strikingly pulls together aspects of a very topical subject. How do you decide on the visual components of such diagrammatic presentations, and what specifically are the five red forms in this one?
The visual structure of the works is largely based on alchemical drawings of the 13th – 18th centuries, entwining these subjects into a holistic mystical space where they become differently animated and resonant. In alchemical drawings, science, art and religion/spirituality co-exist, echoing the recently converging fields illuminated in some of the cards – such as Spiritual Ecology and Nexus thinking – as well as Earth System Science. In the case of Queen of Pentacles – Surveillance Capitalism, the five red forms are based on medieval tents which were used for festivities, tournaments and by the military. Their red and gold colouring suggests royalty, in the sense that big tech is currently where power and control lie.
David Bohm is quoted in the ‘Knight of Wands’ and gets his own card as ‘The Emperor’. Can you say something about him and his importance for you?
Yes, David Bohm is a visionary theoretical physicist who perfectly illuminates the unstable shifting boundary between science and mysticism. He is famous for replying, when asked how his physics differs from what mystics have been attempting to describe from time immemorial, “I don’t know that there’s necessarily any difference.”
The ‘Nine of Swords’ covers both ‘Dark Matter’, which is well known, and also ‘Dark Energy’ of which that I hadn’t heard. How you research such matters, and why is ‘dark energy’ important?
According to current theory, dark matter slows down the expansion of the universe, while dark energy speeds it up. I often read the latest popular physics books, and from 2018 I worked on and off at CERN in Geneva on various projects. While I was there I met a scientist in his 80’s who had spent his life looking for signs of these invisible phenomena, waiting for a single blip on a small black screen set into the Axion telescope, missing every family Christmas as that’s when there’s the best chance of spotting it as the Earth is on the other side of the Sun from the galactic centre.
How did you arrive at the ‘Museums of the Future’ series?
The first museum appeared in a watercolour for the project Survivor (F) (2016-19). It was called Museum of the Algorithm. Survivor (F) described a deep future through the eyes of possibly the last survivor of the human race, or perhaps a machine intelligence, who transmitted images to our present day in a form visible to us. Some of the Museum works are from the project Kabbalistic Futurism (2021-23).
What is that?
Kabbalistic Futurism is a project that emerged out of my interest in the ideas, visions and methodologies of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah and a desire to reimagine these ideas within possible futures. Through it, I tried to write a new mystical text that engaged with current and potential future technological paradigms and scientific theories of the cosmos. Part of the project imagined regenerative architectural and social systems, which included hypothetical Museum designs.
Can you add anything specific about the ‘Museum of Augmented Telepathy’? It seems a tricky concept to get one’s head around!
The Museum of Augmented Telepathy comes out of ideas of the possibility of telepathy, perhaps through a future technology, through the quantum, or through natural telepathic abilities which may turn out to result from quantum phenomena. If you think of augmented reality (AR), it’s looking at the real world through a lens which augments what you are seeing for various reasons or purposes, adding another layer of information/reality. So the idea of a Museum of Augmented Telepathy presumes a future where this phenomenon, AT, has been around long enough for there to already be a museum about its history. And it presupposes a moment in the future where telepathy is so generally accepted and utilised that we have found reasons to augment it, through technology or otherwise. So when we stand in front of that painting we are standing in a hypothetical future where AT is normal and where humanity may have generated or accepted even more alternative models of reality or existence. It asks us to imagine this future and all possible ethical outcomes in advance.
It’s hard to believe that the alluring images of the AI prompt series result from simply refreshing the same command 15 times. Is there more to it than that?
No.
What are people surprised to learn about you?
My father was born in Poland in 1912, studied political science in Paris, and was in the French Resistance during WW2 before escaping through the Pyrenees and Portugal to the UK. He lived to 100 and never accepted my decision to become an artist. The daughter of a Suffolk shopkeeper, my mother was not allowed to go art school, moved to London and worked as secretary to my father until 2005. After his death in 2012 I helped her reinvent herself as an artist and poet. She’s just had her first exhibition in France at the age of 97.