Modern Art Oxford presents the first major UK institutional retrospective by artist Suzanne Treister.
This autumn, Modern Art Oxford presents Prophetic Dreaming, the first major UK institutional retrospective by pioneering digital and para-disciplinary artist Suzanne Treister. Spanning over 40 years of her radical, visionary practice, the show traces Treister’s enduring engagement with the relationships between new technologies, networks of power, alternative belief systems and potential futures of humanity.
Prophetic Dreaming opens with a display of early paintings from the 1980s, including Venus on TV on the Moon (1986), intimating the techno-mystical nature of her later projects. The exhibition charts Treister’s early explorations with digital technology from her series Fictional Videogame Stills (1991-92) to SOFTWARE (1993-94), a series of painted boxes and floppy discs which imagine hypothetical software applications, foreshadowing the apps through which we now mediate our daily lives.
Prophetic Dreaming features a number of Treister’s expansive, multi-year projects. Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky (1995-2006), GOLEM/LOEW: Artificial Life (2002), Operation Swanlake (2004) and HEXEN 2039 (2006). In HEXEN 2.0 (2009-11) Treister connects cybernetics, surveillance, countercultural movements and internet histories through a group of alchemical diagrams and a Tarot deck, as a way of enabling viewers to envision alternative futures. Her recent project, HEXEN 5.0 (2023-25) continues this trajectory, critically examining AI, the climate crisis, and quantum science. Also featured in the exhibition is the immersive and data-visionary world of HFT The Gardener (2014-15), the post-futurist transmissions of SURVIVOR (F) (2016-19), and TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS (2020-23) which imagines models for a techno-spiritual future.
This retrospective highlights the many astonishing, sometimes humorous and often unsettling moments of prophecy which have recurred throughout Treister’s career. Prophetic Dreaming reveals Treister’s prescient practice as a means of comprehending the complexities of the present while imagining new possibilities for what is yet to come.
The exhibition opens on 4 October 2025 and runs until 25 January 2026. Admission is FREE.