Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming

Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming is the first major UK institutional retrospective of the pioneering digital and para-disciplinary artist. Spanning more than forty years, the exhibition maps Treister’s visionary practice and investigations into new technologies, networks of power, alternative belief systems, and the futures they prefigure. Coinciding with the exhibition is the release of the HEXEN 5.0 Tarot, a new visionary deck produced by Treister and published by cosmogenesis.  

Prophetic Dreaming opens with a display of early paintings from the 1980s, including Venus on TV on the Moon (1986), intimating the techno-mystical nature of her later projects. The exhibition charts Treister’s early explorations with digital technology from her series Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–92), to SOFTWARE (1993–94), a series of painted boxes and floppy discs which imagine hypothetical software applications, foreshadowing the apps through which we now mediate our daily lives.  

Major multi‑year projects anchor the retrospective. Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky (1995–2006) navigates the 20th and 21st centuries through Treister’s alter-ego via an interactive CD-Rom, exploring Brodsky’s electronic time-travelling costumes and devices, psychoanalytic case histories, cookery shows, and documentation from her time travel based research projects; GOLEM/LOEW: Artificial Life (2002), Operation Swanlake (2004) and HEXEN 2039 (2006). 

In HEXEN 2.0 (2009–11) Treister connects cybernetics, surveillance, countercultural movements and internet histories through a group of alchemical diagrams and a Tarot deck. Her recent project, HEXEN 5.0 (2023–25) continues this trajectory, critically examining AI, the climate crisis, and quantum science. Also featured in the exhibition is the immersive and data-visionary world of HFT The Gardener (2014–15), the post-futurist transmissions of SURVIVOR (F) (2016–19), and TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS (2020–23). 

The exhibition debuts the Institute of Mystical Earth System Science (2025), a proposal for a new holistic field, involving designs for over 200 global research institutes working towards earth restoration and planetary survival. A new offsite walking tour commission, AI Quantum Dreaming (2025), proposes a series of public sculptures for Oxford, developed through conversations with Oxford-based Quantum researchers. 

Prophetic Dreaming highlights the many astonishing, sometimes humorous and often unsettling moments of prophecy which have recurred throughout Treister’s career. Revealing her prescient practice as a means of comprehending the complexities of the present while imagining new possibilities for what is yet to come.

Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming is made possible thanks to the support of Marcella Ciacci, Ian Hogarth, Erin and Isaac Pritzker and those who wish to remain anonymous. With thanks to Annely Juda Fine Art; Digitalarte; Little Greene; Nuffield College, Oxford; P·P·O·W Gallery; and Ryder Projects.

Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming will be presented at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland in 2026 and reimagined by MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK in 2027.

Publication & HEXEN 5.0 Tarot Deck
Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming is accompanied by a major new publication co-published with cosmogenesis that includes contributions from Lars Bang Larsen, Patricia Domínguez and Val Ravaglia.

Coinciding with the opening of the exhibition cosmogenesis will release Treister’s HEXEN 5.0 Tarot, the long-awaited sequel to her cult classic HEXEN 2.0 Tarot, a deck that opens a lucid, liminal space where collaborative readings can interrogate unfolding techno-futures. Its 78 luminous alchemical drawings braid together terrestrial and interplanetary technologies, corporate technocracies and post-capitalist cooperatives, mass-extinction tipping points and animist awakenings. The deck is currently available for pre-order through cosmogenesis.world.