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Internationally acclaimed artist Susan Hiller’s most recent video installation, PSI Girls, consists of five floor-to-ceiling projections exploring the relationship between “magic” and “art”, using excerpts from popular cinema, collected, sampled and manipulated by Hiller over several years.

PSI Girls focuses on the theme of adolescence and late childhood as represented in the mass media – the unpredictability and threat of unfocused special abilities in children, particularly girls. The work investigates our common understanding of what is possible, and our desires and fantasies of what we wish were possible, using popular film as cultural artifact.

PSI Girls has been sampled from five previously unconnected films in which young women are represented in altered states of consciousness, and empowered with extraordinary and unsettling telekinetic skills. The physical nature of the work responds to the physical powers portrayed – powers of moving, manipulating, controlling and playing. The soundtrack, featuring the rhythmic hand-clapping and drumming of a gospel choir, seems to physically “drive the rhythm of the brain” whilst the vibrantly coloured images absorb and surround the viewer

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