Lily Hibberd
Artist & Writer
About
Lily Hibberd is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working on questions around frontiers of time, memory and the cosmos. Her practice combines painting, writing, photography, sound, moving image, performance, and installation art. The resulting works have been presented in 68 international exhibitions, events and festivals.
Our interplanetary connection with Venus has been the focus of the past four years of Lily’s creative research and archival investigation. She is also working with artists, curators and scientists on Venus Conversations 2024-2034.
Lily is founding editor of the art writing publication un Magazine (2004), co-founder of Parragirls Memory Project (2012), and author and co-author of artist texts and academic books and articles. She holds a PhD by research practice and is a researcher at Université Paris Cité.
Themes
Current Work
Venus Rising
Venus is our closest planetary neighbour yet it is overlooked as a scientific, celestial and cultural object. “Venus Rising” is an interdisciplinary speculation that embraces Venus as a way to appreciate our interplanetary existence. The machine vision of our veiled twin is examined through more than a 150 paintings of the surface of Venus from NASA radar data, in a video and an artist book titled "Venus sees Earth", as well as a sculpture series embodying occlusions in Venus radar datasets.
Venus Sees Earth
A Time Atlas in Reverse
Venus has observed Earth over billions of years. In the eyes of our twin planet, we have evolved in parallel, and we are bound together both geologically and in shared interplanetary consciousness. Venus recounts this history in reverse starting from our common origins in the birth of the Solar System. This artist book tells its story through an atlas of astronomical images of Earth seen by Venus. On their voyage through the Solar System, these images look back at Earth, echoing Walter Benjamin’s 'Angel of History’.
Venus Conversations 2024–2034
Launched at the Science Museum in November 2024, Venus Conversations is a series of dialogues and art projects launching from the planet Venus to explore cultural, scientific and artistic forcefields. This decade-long project is engaging creative and scientific communities to reimagine our relationship with this overlooked planet, organised in collaboration with French art critic and independent curator Annick Bureaud, Austrian art-science curator and scholar Claudia Schnugg, and French art-science curator and producer Natacha Duviquet (Studio Décalé). Visit the webpage for details of events and productions.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principle arts investment and advisory body
Exhibitions & news
My video Éclipse [...] diaphane (created for First Light in 2015) is currently showing in "SPACE: Internal Illuminations” curated by Johan Vikner and Iris Long for Fotografiska Museum, Shanghai from 12 November 2025 to 8 March 2026.
Space: Internal Illuminations poster 2025
Out now! Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon for Digital Museology, produced with Sarah Kenderine and published by Taylor & Francis.
Paintings from the Venus Project feature in the book "Space Feminisms: People, Planets, Power", edited by Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum.
Conversation with Venus
Performance with Dr Alice Le Gall
OpenFactory #9, Centquatre-Paris 10 January 2026
Conceived and written by Lily Hibberd, in this performance Venus takes centre stage in a live dialogue with the planetologist and Venus expert Dr Alice Le Gall from Sorbonne Université, Paris. Given the power to converse, Venus confronts Dr Le Gall with 5.6 millions years of pent-up questions. Venus is not impressed, for one, that it has been overlooked as a subject of science, especially in comparison to its overrated relative, Mars. As the conversation unravels, we discover many surprising dimensions of Venus and the emergence of important new knowledge about our twin planet. Most of all, we realise that Venus may have a life and ideas of its own.
VENUS: "Dr Alice, you know very well that I enjoy being complicated. I rotate very slowly, in the opposite direction from all the other planets in the Solar System, but my atmosphere turns around the other way again. So, Dr. Alice, brilliant human that you are, how do you study a planet as capricious as me?"
Conversation with Venus, 2026. Photo: Annick Bureaud.
Conceived and written by Lily Hibberd, 2026. Performed by Dr Alice Le Gall and Lily Hibberd, moderated by Annick Bureaud. Produced by Venus Conversations 2024–2034 for OpenFactory#9, Centquatre-Paris, 10 January 2026.
Contact
lilyhibberdstudio [insert@] pm.me
