Art in Focus | Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on Your Wall by Susan Hiller | Tate

Susan Hiller created her video installation Belshazzar’s Feast after reading newspaper coverage about people who had witnessed ghostly apparitions and mysterious messages on their TV sets after broadcasting ended at midnight. The press speculated about transmissions from UFOs or other supernatural events, but Hiller recognised what all these explanations refused to acknowledge, which was the innate power of human imagination.
Hiller made adjustments to Belshazzar’s Feast over her life and different versions have sometimes existed at the same time. But when the life of an artist ends, how do their artworks continue to live?
Part of Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum, a research project funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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