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Weekend Tips: What to Do This Weekend in Berlin
October 2 to 4, 2026: Events, festivals, exhibitions and more things to do for your perfect weekend in Berlin. more
Susan Hiller – 'Bad Dreams'
“I’m committed to working with what I call ghosts, that is, with cultural discards, fragments and things that are invisible to most people but intensely important to a few: situations, ideas and experiences that haunt us collectively.”
- Susan Hiller
Dreams, trance, hallucinations, spirituality, faith, altered states of consciousness, encounters with the otherworldly, and mystical phenomena of all kinds have, across cultures and times, given form to desires, fantasies, fears, and beliefs. For five decades, British artist Susan Hiller (b. 1940, USA – † 2019, UK) explored these uncanny territories, tracing how such experiences are represented, remembered and recounted, and how they acquire meaning.
Bad Dreams, the first survey of Hiller’s work in Berlin, a city that shaped her practice in the early 2000s, delves into the artist’s enduring yet strikingly contemporary investigation into how our personal and collective imaginaries are shaped by and revealed through images and objects, mass media, and popular culture. Drawing on her enduring fascination with the (im)possibility of translating phenomena that resist easy explanation, the exhibition unfolds as a series of encounters. Ghostly images seem to appear, bodies to defy gravity, and children to display supernatural abilities, while voices recount UFO sightings and near-death experiences. Yet for Hiller, the uncanny is never far removed from everyday life. Children’s wallpaper and toy kitchens point to the domestic sphere as a space where social expectations and imagination take shape, while holy water, enigmatic images, and other curiosities reveal how ordinary things become charged with meaning through association, context, and storytelling. The exhibition also extends to the internet, which Hiller was among the first to explore as an artistic medium, treating it as a repository of psychic desires, beliefs, and secrets.
A groundbreaking figure in conceptual and multimedia art, Hiller’s five-decade-long practice probes how fantasy, fear, and meaning are constructed, and how they shape our perceptions of the world. Bad Dreams returns to an epistemological question at the heart of her work: how do we give form to what we cannot fully explain?
- Susan Hiller
Dreams, trance, hallucinations, spirituality, faith, altered states of consciousness, encounters with the otherworldly, and mystical phenomena of all kinds have, across cultures and times, given form to desires, fantasies, fears, and beliefs. For five decades, British artist Susan Hiller (b. 1940, USA – † 2019, UK) explored these uncanny territories, tracing how such experiences are represented, remembered and recounted, and how they acquire meaning.
Bad Dreams, the first survey of Hiller’s work in Berlin, a city that shaped her practice in the early 2000s, delves into the artist’s enduring yet strikingly contemporary investigation into how our personal and collective imaginaries are shaped by and revealed through images and objects, mass media, and popular culture. Drawing on her enduring fascination with the (im)possibility of translating phenomena that resist easy explanation, the exhibition unfolds as a series of encounters. Ghostly images seem to appear, bodies to defy gravity, and children to display supernatural abilities, while voices recount UFO sightings and near-death experiences. Yet for Hiller, the uncanny is never far removed from everyday life. Children’s wallpaper and toy kitchens point to the domestic sphere as a space where social expectations and imagination take shape, while holy water, enigmatic images, and other curiosities reveal how ordinary things become charged with meaning through association, context, and storytelling. The exhibition also extends to the internet, which Hiller was among the first to explore as an artistic medium, treating it as a repository of psychic desires, beliefs, and secrets.
A groundbreaking figure in conceptual and multimedia art, Hiller’s five-decade-long practice probes how fantasy, fear, and meaning are constructed, and how they shape our perceptions of the world. Bad Dreams returns to an epistemological question at the heart of her work: how do we give form to what we cannot fully explain?
Runtime: Sat, 17/10/2026 to Sun, 10/01/2027
Price info: Berlin Welcome Card holders 6,00 €
Tickets can only be purchased on site and with card payment.
Price: €10.00
Reduced price: €6.00
Reduced price info: Berlin Welcome Card holders 4,50 €
Free admission to visitors up to and including 18, Friends of KW and Berlin Biennale, and KW Lover* cardholders, Berechtigungsnachweis holders (former berlinpass), Recipients of ALG II, students of Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin, ICOM Members and Museumsbund Members
Tickets can only be purchased on site and with card payment.
Price: €10.00
Reduced price: €6.00
Reduced price info: Berlin Welcome Card holders 4,50 €
Free admission to visitors up to and including 18, Friends of KW and Berlin Biennale, and KW Lover* cardholders, Berechtigungsnachweis holders (former berlinpass), Recipients of ALG II, students of Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin, ICOM Members and Museumsbund Members
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