Suzanne Treister: Hexen 2.0

Tarot Readings with Mark Pilkington

British contemporary artist Suzanne Triester bases her practice around humanity’s relationship with technologies and explores there concepts with the use of alternative belief systems.

Exhibited in the drawing room at Braziers House is a selection of work from Triester’s Hexen 2.0 series. The walls display 5 diagrams each of which chart key figures, theories, events and institutions of the twentieth century. Triester focus is on the rise of cybernetics and the research of governmental programmes of mass control. These web like illustrations also depict key figures of the counter cultures with developed in concurrence of governmental technological developments, the work is a visual representation of the entanglement of the influencing forces of our history. They allow viewers connect strands of the historical web that has created our present an reveal the ways in which they have shaped our world view.  

Also in the drawing room is a display of Triesters Hexen 2.0 Tarot; a redesigning of a traditional tarot, the suits of old have been turned into significant figures, events and aspects of science fiction, counter culture and cybernetics – H.G Wells, Martin Heidegger, LSD, Alan Turing.

Throughout the weekend Mark Pilkington, writer and publisher at Strange Attractor, hosts group readings of the tarots. It’s another instance of the Supernatural ethos of blurring the lines between visitor and artist as the cards are interpreted by the attendees. These groups reading are not an attempt to predict the future, which is a common misconception of how Tarot cards function. They are in fact a means by which to understand the forces that have created our current time, it’s a deconstructionist game for analysing and assessing recent history, the present and imagining a future, and is done so as a collective.