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Connect the dots

In a blending of fact and fantasy, lessons for a troubled age
Gallery Review | Search restaurants | Archives

By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
September 26th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
A radar base and futuristic psy-ops weapon provide two of many conspiracy points in an amusingly paranoid show.
Suzanne Treister: Hexen 2039

at Školská 28 Ends Oct. 5. Školská 28, Prague 1–New Town. Open Mon.–Fri. 1–5 p.m.

Suzanne Treister’s “Hexen 2039” is a fantastical and perpetually expanding art project involving the artist’s alter ego, Rosalind Brodsky — a para-scientific researcher of the future who is occupied with new military-occult technologies being developed for use in psychological warfare. Like some character out of a novel by Thomas Pynchon or Umberto Eco, Brodsky is a delusional time traveler who works for IMATI (Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality) in the year 2039, investigating ancient and contemporary systems, especially occult and military histories.
Through drawings, diagrams, videos, a Web site and site-specific interventions (or “performances” in art lingo), Brodsky mines the complex and seemingly endless links between conspiracy theories about behavior-control experiments by the U.S. government, Soviet brainwashing experiments, British intelligence agencies, occult groups, Hollywood, Disney, witchcraft in Eastern Europe and neuroscientific research connected to the U.S. military’s Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations (PSYOP) program.
For Treister — who was born in London in 1958, studied at the Chelsea School of Art (M.A. 1982) and currently lives in London and Berlin — it seems “Hexen 2039” is more than just a delusion or flight of her imagination. She unearths real figures, (embellished) facts and myths throughout history that connect to current events. All these she has meticulously charted in the form of a family tree.
Due to events occurring in the world today — global shifts in the balance of power, climate change and new developments in warfare — there is a rising sense of uncertainty that feeds conspiracy theories, as people try to fill in the gaps and make sense of what’s going on. Treister’s project tries to demonstrate that in previous periods of uncertainty throughout history, and particularly within the military, there have been similar spikes of interest in the occult and alternative systems of belief.
The exhibition at Školská 28 includes a mockumentary showing interviews with defense officials, Russian biophysicists and so on, along with a glass case containing various artifacts. Treister has drawn her conspiracy theories chart on two walls in the main room. At the center of the largest chart is the film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), creators of the military-occult film Stargate (1994) as well as The Wizard of Oz (1939).
According to some conspiracy theorists, MGM is linked to the occult group Ordo Templi Orientis and Aleister Crowley, as well as the U.S. military, since only after Stargate was released did the CIA decommission and partially declassify documents about its psychic espionage program, which was also called Stargate (conducted 1991–95).
And this is just a fraction of Brodsky’s chart. It also includes a link to Disney’s Fantasia, the Russian composer Mussorgsky, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Chernobog (the black god in Slavic myths), Freemasons, Pavlov’s research, the Illuminati, the Hexentanzplatz (a witches’ dance floor on a high peak in the Halz mountains of Germany), and on and on.
Another chart on a side wall includes a pyramid, references to MI5 (the British counter-intelligence agency) and John Dee’s crystal ball, which is in the collection of the British Museum.
“Hexen 2039” is currently winding up an international tour that has been to cities in the United Kingdom, the United States (San Francisco and Philadelphia), Brazil and Germany, culminating in Prague. The exhibition here includes a seminar (Wednesday, Sept. 26) by the Mlok association that will attempt to reconstruct a seminar on psychotropics held in 1978. The agenda includes a screening of the documentary film Experiment, about the Czech Army’s experiments in administering psychotropic drugs to soldiers in the 1970s.
The effect of all this is such that, after a while, you have to remind yourself you’re in the safe confines of an art gallery. It is art, after all, but with a sly wickedness.
What “Hexen 2039” ultimately reveals is that the world can be a scary place, full of spooks — both ghostly apparitions and government spies. It seems to cry out to visitors: Wake up and face it. You can run, but you can’t hide.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (26/09/2007):

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