Suzanne Treister - bio/info

Suzanne Treister was born in London and studied at St Martin's and Chelsea Schools of Art.
Treister has lived in Australia, New York and Berlin and is currently based in London.

Primarily a painter through the 1980s, Treister was a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations.

Currently using various media including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and painting, Treister's practice deals with notions of identity, history, power and the hallucinatory. Her constructions, described by Art in America as 'One of the most sustained fantasy trips of contemporary art', belie a deeper mission: to explore how we make sense of history and the politics of war.

Website: http://www.ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/

Treister has shown nationally and internationally since 1981 and is a founder member of three collaborative groups, NIH, PI and ICOLS.

Recent exhibitions and events: HEXEN2039 at CHELSEA space, Warburg Institute, Ognisko Polskie, Science Museum, British Museum, Dana Centre , London; Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne; Skolská 28, Prague; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; New Art Gallery Walsall; City Lights, San Francisco and www.hexen2039.net. Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Tate Britain, London; Basekamp, Philadelphia, USA; FILE RIO festival internacional de linguagem eletrônica, Brazil. 'Operation Swanlake' at Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Gallery Skuc, Ljubljana; Magazin4, Vorarlberger Kunstverein, Bregenz; and Œ(The World May Be) Fantastic¹, 2002 Biennale of Sydney; ŒDon't Call it Performance¹, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid and El Museo del Barrio, New York, USA; the Moscow International Film Festival and File, Brazil.

Suzanne Treister is represented by Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Works/articles in recent publications include:
'Modern Art: A Critical Introduction' (2nd edition), Pam Meecham & Julie Sheldon, Routledge London and New York 2005;
'Videogames and Art' Ed. Andy Clarke, Grethe Mitchell, Pub. Intellect Books UK and University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Download pdf essay: 'From Fictional Video Games to Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky

Recent monographs include:
'No Other Symptoms - Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky' CD ROM with 124 page colour hardback book. Published by Black Dog Publishing, London 1999.
'Hexen 2039 - new military-occult technologies for psychological warfare', Black Dog Publishing, London 2006.

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Treister is currently working on the following projects:


Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky


Since 1995 Suzanne Treister has been developing the project, Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky. Brodsky, her heteronymic identity, with whom she shares similar Anglo/Eastern European/Jewish roots, is a delusional time traveller working at an imaginary 'controversial' Government Research Institute in London, the 'Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI)'. Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky charts her life and adventures as she travels through time and history, through fact and delusion: attempting to rescue her grandparents from the camps of the Second World War, constructing a laboratory in Mad King Ludwig's castle, and visiting the Russian Revolution and the swinging 60s. She receives analysis from Freud, Jung and Kristeva, hosts her own cookery show and sings in her own band.
Recent works, eg. 'Hexen 2039', 'Golem/Loew-Artificial Life' and 'Operation Swanlake' have been presented as 'Time Travel Research Projects' from Brodsky's host institute, IMATI. (see below )

Notes - on IMATI Time Travel Research Projects

Time Travel Research Project: Golem/Loew - Artificial Life
A Golem, an artificial man made out of clay, was created in 16th century Prague by Rabbi Yehuda Loew (1520 -1609). Tracing the descendants of the Loew dynasty alongside manifestations of the Golem name/legend through history to the present day and into the future, the intention of this project is to test whether an ability and/or desire to create artificial life is a function carried in the DNA. This project takes us on research trips to Prague, to the Loew's Cineplex and Hotel chains of the US, to German Robotics companies, to perfumeries in Madrid and a film distribution company in Italy. It engages with numerology and occult role playing games on the internet.

Time Travel Research Project: Operation Swanlake
Utilising the harnessed energy of a black hole located in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan) Operation Swan Lake began in 2028 as an attempt to develop a language capable of communicating with the universe. Hypothesising a connection, substantiated through alchemical research, sonic components were developed using retrieved recordings of swans from specific historical periods and global locations and from first performances of Wagner's Lohengrin at the Hoftheatre, Weimar in 1850 and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake in 1895 at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg.
Renamed the Kirov Theatre in 1935, after Sergei Kirov, the murdered rival of Stalin, the name was also given to a series of Soviet missile cruisers. In 2028 the last of these ships, the Pyotr Velikiy Kirov Class Project 1144.2 Heavy Missile Cruiser, was decommissioned and purchased by IMATI as spare parts for the sonic missile Swan Lake which in 2029 was constructed at Cape Canaveral, Florida. In November of the same year Swan Lake transmitted a series of complex audio frequencies into outer space.

Time Travel Research Project: Hexen 2039
HEXEN 2039 charts Brodsky¹s para scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military through a series of drawings and diagrams, a video, website and site-specific interventions. This complex body of work uncovers links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behaviour control experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP) and new research in contemporary neuroscience.
The results of HEXEN 2039 are utilised by the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) in the development and delivery of a range of non lethal weapons between 2040 and 2045.

HEXEN II, the sequel, is in development.

International Corporation of Lost Structures (ICOLS)

In 2000 Treister founded the International Corporation of Lost Structures (ICOLS). ICOLS is an artist driven, international cross cultural collaborative organisation whose 60 members/contributors include artists, writers, film makers, scientists, poets, anthropologists, theorists, activists and art historians.

ICOLS is intended to be a creative international space which utilises as a structural device the dominant contemporary model of the corporate structure. Within this structure the departmental titles; Department of Global Disenchantment, Department of Revolutionary Nostalgia, Department of Future Projections, Local Unit of Missing Links, Department of Global Nostalgia, International Department of Local Aesthetics, Department of Dislocated Memory, create contexts for analyses of history, the present and projections for the future.

Each ICOLS member chooses a job in one of the above Departmental Offices from which to work on projects and become involved in collaborative operations.

Since 2004 the latest ICOLS project, the ICOLS Strategy Defense and Arms Fair has been touring to: Silja ferry, Baltic sea; the University of South Florida; Columbia University, NY; CCA, Glasgow and The Performance Space, Sydney.

ICOLS live events, publications and projects are archived at http://www.icols.org

NATO

NATO's codification system allows it to describe and classify large parts of the world around us. Items as diverse as perfume, battleships, animals, electronic equipment and musical instruments are ordered and represented in a way that make them comprehensible and accessible to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation so that they can be articulated and used by the Military.

Within the codification system the NATO Supply Classification (NSC) uses a four-digit coding structure. The first two digits of the code number identify the Group, eg. Group 77 - Musical Instruments, Phonographs, and Home-Type Radios, whilst the last two digits of the code number identify the Classes within the Group, eg. 7710 - Musical Instruments (complete).

Since 2004 I have been working with these 4 digit NATO Supply Classifications to develop an encyclopedic series of watercolours. The project references the Western fine art representative tradition as a systematic ordering and understanding of the world, with attendant intentions and subtexts; the memento mori, ideas of ownership and knowledge. Specifically referenced is the history of watercolours as a scientific illustrative tool. By conjuring these histories and narratives of representational painting within the taxonomies of the military, the work problematises them and brings them into the matrix of unease that constitutes our understanding of the world today: and which indeed may be an outcome of these. The most innocuous objects can be articulated by, or are invested with, the possibilities of agency.

An online guide to the NATO Codification System can be found at: http://www.nato.int/structur/AC/135/ncs_guide/english/e_index.htm

ALCHEMY

A series of works which transcribe front pages of international daily newspapers into alchemical drawings, reframing the world as a place animated by strange forces, powers and belief systems. These works redeploy the languages and intentions of alchemy: the transformation of materials and essences and the revealed understanding of the world as a text, as a realm of powers and correspondences which, if properly understood, will allow man to take on transformative power.
http://www.ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/ALCHEMY/ALCHEMY.html

Other projects are in development.

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