Suzanne Treister

Suzanne Treister was born in London in 1958 and lives and works between London and the French Pyrenees. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing, photography, video, watercolour, the internet, and interactive technologies. Since the late 1980s, she has developed projects that combine extensive research with fictional narratives, speculative systems, and alternative forms of knowledge. Her work investigates the relationships between technology, science, history, power, belief, and consciousness, often constructing elaborate fictional frameworks through which established systems of knowledge can be questioned and reimagined. Treister studied at Brighton Polytechnic from 1977 to 1978, at St Martin’s School of Art from 1978 to 1981, and at Chelsea School of Art from 1981 to 1982. From the late 1980s onwards, she became closely associated with emerging forms of digital and new media art, producing projects that brought together technological developments, science fiction, occult histories, alternative belief systems, and speculative futures. Her projects frequently unfold over extended periods and take the form of interconnected networks of images, texts, diagrams, websites, books, films, and installations. A central feature of Treister’s practice is the creation of fictional organisations, characters, taxonomies, and systems that allow her to examine contemporary structures of knowledge and power from oblique perspectives. Projects such as *No Other Symptoms – Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky*, *HEXEN 2.0*, *HFT The Gardener*, *SURVIVOR (F)*, and *The Escapist BHST* combine research with invented histories and narratives. Through these complex bodies of work, Treister explores subjects ranging from military and technological systems to artificial intelligence, consciousness, mysticism, ecology, and possible forms of human and technological transformation. Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions and biennials including at Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Wien, Centre Pompidou-Metz, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, the Hayward Gallery, ZKM Karlsruhe, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Centre Pompidou, Moderna Museet, and the Shanghai Biennale. In 2019, Serpentine commissioned *From SURVIVOR (F) to The Escapist BHST*, a digital project that extended her investigation of speculative forms of consciousness and technology through a combination of a publication and web-based augmented reality. More recently, her work has been presented at Tate Modern and the Warburg Institute. In 2025–26, Modern Art Oxford presented *Prophetic Dreaming*, a major survey exhibition spanning several decades of her practice. Treister has also developed a sustained engagement with scientific and technological research through commissions and collaborations. In 2018 she received the COLLIDE International Award from CERN and FACT, which supported the development of *The Holographic Universe Theory of Art History*. The project brought together video, research, and speculative thought to consider the relationship between the holographic principle and the history of art. Her engagement with CERN subsequently continued through *Scientific Dreaming*, a project exploring the intersection of scientific research, imagination, and artistic practice. Treister’s research-based practice is closely connected to her extensive production of publications and artist’s books. These include *NATO: The Military Codification System for the Ordering of Everything in the World*, *HEXEN 2.0*, *HFT The Gardener*, *Hexen 2039*, *The Spaceships of Bordeaux*, and *From SURVIVOR (F) to The Escapist BHST*. *The Spaceships of Bordeaux*, developed between 2013 and 2022, combined sculpture, research, architecture, and speculative narratives in an investigation of Bordeaux and the Garonne, bringing together questions of technology, ecology, history, and possible futures. In 2025, Treister was awarded an Assetto Fellowship at the Warburg Institute, continuing her long-standing investigation into the connections between technology, science, mysticism, and systems of power. Her ongoing practice combines artistic invention with extensive research, creating fictional and speculative structures through which contemporary forms of knowledge, belief, technology, and authority can be examined from unexpected perspectives.