Susan Hiller’s landmark work Midnight Self-Portrait, created in the 1980s, is a series of hand-worked photographs based on self-portraits she took late at night over the course of nine years in photo booths installed in subway and railway stations. On these images she densely inscribed indecipherable signs, as though encoding her own face, thereby questioning how the “self” might be represented. Deliberately resisting the singular image of womanhood and the fixed model of self demanded by society, she seeks to slip free of universal systems of signs and rules, and to explore the possibility of another language.