Susan Hiller

Index: The J Street Project 2002-5



303 photographs each 28.67 x 20 cm, map, list of sites; overall dimensions variable

Three years ago, Hiller was walking through the centre of Berlin when she came across a most unexpected street sign. It read Judenstrasse - Jews' Street - as if there were nothing odd about preserving the name of a place whose former residents had only so recently been killed. Hiller was shocked and amazed. She took a journey through Germany. Judendorf, Judenhof, Judenweg, Judengasse - it turned out there were 303 streets named after their sometime inhabitants. Hiller photographed them all: in leafy lanes, in suburbia, in snowy towns and busy cities... The tension between these perfectly cheerful locations and the emotions invoked by the signs increases exponentially. Subtlety is everything. Hiller seems to present the evidence quite coolly, but this only allows an even greater pressure of feeling to build. The images are haunted by the signs: literally signs of people who are no longer there, whose lives were destroyed. To witness them all together is to feel the past rise up...you want to shout 'Look! Don't you see them?' As if you were suddenly able to see ghosts. There aren't many artists whose every new work you would want to see and Hiller is one of them.

Laura Cummings,The Observer,2005

detail

J Street video

Brandenburg Suite

J Street publication