Prophetic Dreaming is the first major institutional retrospective by pioneering digital and para-disciplinary artist Suzanne Treister (b. 1958). Spanning more than forty years, the exhibition maps Treister’s visionary practice and investigations into new technologies, networks of power, alternative belief systems, and the futures they prefigure.

From the prophetic early paintings of the 1980s to her groundbreaking digital works of the 1990s, the exhibition charts Treister’s evolution through key projects including those of her time-travelling alter ego Rosalind Brodsky, and the influential HEXEN 2.0 series, a Tarot deck and group of alchemical diagrams connecting cybernetics, surveillance, countercultural movements and internet histories. Her recent project, HEXEN 5.0 (2023-25) continues this trajectory, critically examining AI, the climate crisis, and quantum science.

Prophetic Dreaming highlights the many astonishing, sometimes humorous and often unsettling moments of premonition which have recurred throughout Treister’s career. The exhibition reveals her prescient practice as a means of comprehending the complexities of the present while imagining new possibilities for what is yet to come.

Ahead of the exhibition opening, the artist spoke with curator Jessie Robertson about the themes and ideas explored in the exhibition.

JR: Narrative fiction has always been an important part of your practice. Can you share some of the texts that have inspired you over the past 40 years?

ST: In gaps between long projects I sometimes start to write a novel. I’ll work out the plot and write a few chapters and a lot of notes, and then I’ll stop because I’ve got an idea for a new art project, which sometimes comes out of the writing. Survivor (F) started off as a novel about an artist who was building a spaceship in an Estonian forest while his girlfriend in London was writing prose from the point of view of an algorithm. In the late 70s and early 80s I was into dozens of writers, for example Mikhail Bulgakov, Bruno Schulz, Philip K. Dick, Simone de Beauvoir, Jorge Luis Borges, Elias Canetti, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino. Recent favourites are Octavia E. Butler, Liu Cixin and Benjamin Labatut.

JR: What appealed to you about time travel when you were working on the Rosalind Brodsky project?

ST: Time travel is a science fiction trope which allows the author to imagine hypothetical futures or alternative past histories, often with a view to anticipating future social models and technologies, as political commentary and/or as a warning. With the Brodsky project it was originally a way of dealing with my personal family history of the Holocaust in relation to present day and possible future developments of societal technologies of mass destruction or renewal. The later Brodsky time travel research projects like HEXEN 2039 became less personal and more overtly politically motivated.

JR: How do you use diagrams in your work?

ST: I use diagrams to map big picture histories which perhaps are hard for people to visualise. Some of my diagrams include projected future elements. I use alchemical drawing structures for these diagrams to invest them with hypothetical powers of transmutation and change for the better.