In Prophetic Dreaming at Modern Art Oxford, Treister’s accumulative, expansive works help us think through a techno-futurist present
Suzanne Treister’s retrospective fills the entirety of Modern Art Oxford’s extensive galleries and covers more than four decades of work. During that time the artist’s explorations of technology and mysticism have marched from the margins to the mainstream, projecting us from the early days of eSports and home computers, through the present and on into multiple imaginary futures. Treister’s early works were inspired by arcade gaming: the painting Detroit Kid Video Game (1990) shows two small frames of an animated boxing match with patterning across much of the canvas. From this Treister shifts into photography, inventing stills from a fictional videogame and recording the resulting computer screen image with a camera, to produce the photographic series Fictional Videogame Stills / Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise? (1991–92), a set of stills taken of a computer screen depicting an apparently subaquatic fictional videogame.
These lead into SOFTWARE (1993–94), a series of painted boxes containing floppy disks that attempt to imagine how gaming and related computer technologies might develop: Switch No. 1 has the words ‘ON/ON’ painted in a bright mix of colours over a dark background. Inside the box are two disks, one with sky and clouds painted on the label, the second featuring a landscape, perhaps suggesting how computer technology is expanding into every corner of the world; or, at a stretch, prophesying cloud computing.
Treister’s projects are accumulative, expansive works constructed from many small creations, evident in the Rosalind Brodsky works (1995–2006): film, costume, performance, painting and Brodsky’s own computer game, all built around the eponymous fictional time-traveller (born 1970, died 2058). Alongside later works, the Brodsky project provides a critical commentary on a male-dominated and increasingly nihilistic technological dystopia of surveillance and control.
Brodsky works at a government agency called The Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) and undertakes research such as Golem/Loew: Artificial Life (2001–02), an assignment to discover whether an interest in artificial life is genetically determined: gathered under the Golem rubric are a flowchart with words crowding around an image of this creature, and a separate array of wall-mounted words and images on multiple pieces of paper. Much of the work is crowded with language: visually in paintings, and in the relentless spoken soundtracks of moving-image pieces. Flow diagrams become the containers for an overflow of ideas.
Tarot decks are made extensive use of here, reimagined to explore futures in which the digital merges with the mystical. Having first reconfigured tarot cards using the Brodsky alter ego for HEXEN 2039 (2004–06), Treister moved from a drawn graphite tarot to a technicolour explosion of words with her HEXEN 2.0 deck (2009–11), individual ink and watercolour works on paper that were later commercially issued as printed cards. Treister’s initial HEXEN 2.0 trump card depicts Aldous Huxley amid a blaze of psychedelic swirls and the names of Huxley’s best-known books, Brave New World (1932), The Doors of Perception (1954) and Island (1962). Other words and slogans on the card include ‘One World Order’ and ‘Snooze Labs LSD’.
While two iconic occult tarot decks are displayed within the show, Treister’s designs are much more elaborate than their mystical precursors, packed as they are with hybrid verbal-visual information. If the pretty outer forms of many of Treister’s tarot cards appear gender-coded as feminine, the content veers towards subjects more often associated with outpourings of male rage – such as paranoid conspiracy theories. These twenty-first-century mutations are designed not so much for prophesy as to help us think our way through a techno-futurist present, and where it may lead us if we don’t learn to control it. HEXEN 2.0 high- lights state-backed scientific investigations into systems of psychological control and how attempts to critically document them have sometimes tipped over into fantasy. In HEXEN 5.0 (2023–25), the ‘Fool’ card is dominated by the capitalised word ‘BLOCKCHAIN’, while on the card for ‘The World’ the central term is ‘Astro Cognition’, and the many other words the image contains are formatted as a diagram to resemble the Kabbalah’s tree of life, a recurring motif.
Prophetic Dreaming demonstrates not just the uses of associative thinking to help us visualise the future, but also the limits of such approaches – characteristic as they are of paranoia and conspiracy theories. Treister uses fictional characters and fictional corporations as vehicles to point us towards a more grounded understanding of the world – an artist who arrives at truth through fictions that suggest that much of what is passed off as real is actually fake.
Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming at Modern Art Oxford, through 12 April
From the November 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
