The Artist Who Dreams the Future: Suzanne Treister’s Major Retrospective ‘Prophetic Dreaming’
Pioneering digital and interdisciplinary artist Suzanne Treister (b. 1958) is presenting the first large-scale institutional retrospective of her more than forty-year career, Prophetic Dreaming, at Modern Art Oxford (4 October 2025 – 12 April 2026). The exhibition lays bare Treister’s visionary engagement with technology, networks of power, alternative belief systems, and the futures those systems prefigure.
Forty Years of Prophecy: From Technology to the Occult
The retrospective traces Treister’s trajectory from her prophetic early paintings of the 1980s to the groundbreaking digital works of the 1990s and beyond. Key projects mark the journey:
- Rosalind Brodsky: Treister’s time-travelling alter ego, one of the landmark explorations of early digital art and alternative identity.
- HEXEN 2.0: The artist’s most influential series, a Tarot deck and set of alchemical diagrams that connect cybernetics, surveillance, counter-cultural movements and the history of the internet.
- HEXEN 5.0 (2023–25): In this ongoing project, Treister continues her critical examination of today’s most urgent issues: artificial intelligence, the climate crisis and quantum science.
Coincidences and Moments of Foresight
Prophetic Dreaming highlights the recurring, sometimes humorous, sometimes unsettling moments of prescience that run throughout Treister’s career. Her practice serves both as a tool for making sense of today’s complexity and as a means of imagining new possibilities for what is yet to come.
The exhibition invites viewers on a journey from early paintings such as Venus on TV on the Moon (1986), through the prescient digital visions of the Fictional Videogame Stills series of the early 1990s, to the latest commentaries on contemporary technological mythologies in HEXEN 5.0.
Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming
Venue: Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, England
Dates: On view until 12 April 2026
