Suzanne Treister’s Hexen 2.0 Tarot
Ambitious, innovative — and incredibly original
I’m still trying to fathom the extent (and intent) of Suzanne Treister’s Hexen 2.0 project, but I’ll tell you what I’ve figured out so far. Beginning with — these comments from a 2013 New York Times review of the Hexen installation, then showing at a New York gallery:
The British artist Suzanne Treister has a unifying theory about everything that would concern anyone worried about the current state of global affairs.
[Her] main theme is control — social, mental, technological and otherwise — exerted most powerfully and pervasively by means of feedback mechanisms. The stock market’s feedback-induced ups and downs would be an example.
Ms. Treister delivers her thinking not in a footnote-larded treatise but in the form of a set of tarot cards, each illustrating in cartoon drawings and handwritten text a person, idea or event that changed the course of 20th-century history.
The connections drawn within and among the cards are so mind-boggling to contemplate that it seems entirely appropriate to comprehend them within a magical system like the tarot.
Treister’s original drawings for the Hexen Tarot — which comprises both arcanas — are displayed in a complex installation that also…