Suzanne Treister

On this page you will find a brief summary of recent works and projects by Suzanne Treister with examples of works on the left of this page. The links below link to relevant articles on Suzanne Treister's web site.

Suzanne Treister (b.1958 London, UK) studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982). She is now based in London having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin. 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. Treister’s practice deals with notions of identity and history.

Treister's Nato watercolour project (NSC) 2004 -2008 utilises NATO's codification system which 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.

The Alchemy series of works takes information from front covers of daily newspapers; The Financial Times, Jüdische Allgemeine, Al-Ahram, Dziennik Polski, The Guardian, Le Figaro and The New York Times, and transcribes this 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 transmutation 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.

The Alchemy series includes also a 5.5 metre wall drawing, A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security. Treister has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic military technology. The format in which she organises this information is the schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot, from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation of linkages between the worlds above and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between these realms.

In Correspondence: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe 324 sheets of letterheaded paper from governments, presidential offices, embassies, NGOs, arms companies and corporations are reproduced in pencil and arranged in 9 cool elegant grids. The grids crackle with the invisible energy of exchange, of correspondence, of plotting, of the covert and the overt, the hidden as well as the official.

War Artists is a group of 12 portrait drawings. From Laura Knight to Tsuguharu Foujita to Michael D. Fay to Steve McQueen the images span the Second World War and the Iraq war. These small drawings pose deep and complex questions about the agendas and possibilities of art and how it might represent the worlds around us, about the relationship between representation and power.

The work Emeyefive was exhibited at the Frieze Art fair, October 2010: Born in 1935, Stella Rimington was Director-General of MI5 from 1992 - 1996. Her roles have included and been divided between the Security Services, archival work, amateur dramatics, family and spy-fiction writing.Two parts of the triptych(left & right) are 50 drawings from the autobiography of Stella Rimmington. The centre drawing is a single felt tip drawing; Alchemy: At Risk, a spy-ficton novel by Stella Rimmington. The DVD is looped CCTV footage of Stella Rimmington giving a lecture in London.

Suzanne Treister has exhibited widely: 2008: Alchemy, P.P.O.W., New York; Alma Enterprises, London; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany; 2007: Skolská 28, Prague; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Tate Britain; Basekamp, Philadelphia; HEXEN2039 in London at CHELSEA space, Warburg Institute, Ognisko Polskie, Science Museum, British Museum, Dana Centre

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