Hito Steyerl

The German artist Hito Steyerl has used her work in the Venice Biennale to call out one of the world’s biggest weapons companies for appropriating Leonardo da Vinci’s name.

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Steyerl’s immersive installation focuses on the making of the video game "Skyscraper: Stairway to Chaos" by the Ukrainian company Ace3D, based on Saddam Hussein’s unrealised plans to reconstruct the Tower of Babel in Babylon, the ancient capital that he began rebuilding in the 1980s.

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A three-channel video that begins with the animation of a fragmented sentence: HELL YEAH WE FUCK DIE—which, according to Billboard magazine, are the most frequently used five words in the English language music charts of the past decade. They provide the basis for the musical compositions that score documentary lab footage showing computer-simulated or actual physical force applied to humanoid robots to test their balance behavior.

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The film uses footage from south-eastern Turkey of the Kurdish town of Cizre on the Syrian border, which now resembles a ghost town following numerous skirmishes of escalating intensity between the government and the PKK footage from south-eastern Turkey of the Kurdish town of Cizre on the Syrian border, which now resembles a ghost town following numerous skirmishes of escalating intensity between the government and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). It is the hometown of Ismail al-Jazari, the Arab polymath (he was a scholar, inventor, mathematician, engineer and artist) who wrote a book about mechanical apparatuses in 1205 to convey knowledge about ingenious devices. He described a hundred mechanical devices, some 80 of which are trick vessels of various kinds, along with instructions on how to construct them. Steyerl combines the pictures of the town with questions addressed to Siri, the software installed in iPhones: What role does computer technology play in war?

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In this immersive work, which debuted at the 2015 German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Steyerl probes the pleasures and perils of image circulation in a moment defined by the unprecedented global flow of data. Ricocheting between genres—news reportage, documentary film, video games, and internet dance videos—Factory of the Sun uses the motifs of light and acceleration to explore what possibilities are still available for collective resistance when surveillance has become a mundane part of an increasingly virtual world. Factory of the Sun tells the surreal story of workers whose forced moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine.

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Liquidity Inc. takes up liquidity as a concept in all of its physical, metaphorical, bodily, spiritual, meteorological, and financial forms

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Steyerl’s new lecture, pro­duced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, takes as its departure point her March 2013 talk ‘I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production’ and focuses on the arms industry, a phenomenon constantly re-conceptualized by the media through the regular flow of images. It asks the question of how a museum and a battlefield could be related. The question emerges when Steyerl follows the trace of an empty bullet casing which she found in the area where the mass grave of Andrea Wolf and her friends were located in Van, Turkey.

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The film mocks an instructional film on the idea of becoming invisible in the digital world.

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Using video, sculpture and archival material, the work gives form to a dramatic event that took place in 1993 during the war in Bosnia, when a paramilitary unit abducted 20 people from a train. Hito Steyerl has made her mark on the international art scene as one of the sharpest observers and innovators in the documentary genre. In her critical perspective on documentary, the only objective truth appears to be the lack of information. On this basis, Steyerl examines the role played by the image production process – of which she is herself a part – and technological tools as witnesses to the truth when we write our common history.

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In Strike II, the artist and her daughter hit the camera with a pair of hammers, attacking image-making apparatus and representation.

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Abstract (2012) is a return to the contested narrative of Andrea Wolf’s death, with Steyerl traveling to Kurdistan in search of information about her friend's murder. The work links cinematic shooting and military warfare together, implicating Germany’s role in the operation. This has been screened in the past as a dual-channel work. But in this case it has been re-purposed by the artist as a split screen film. (KG) From e-flux: Abstract presents a scenario in which the violence of warfare and the violence of aesthetics twist around each other. The two-channel video visits the site where Steyerl’s friend Andrea Wolf was killed in 1998, but through a prism that refracts cinematic language against the weapons that killed her friend. As the site and circumstances of her death fold into the act of witnessing it from a distance, the ethical burden of identifying those responsible also appears to live and die with the debris that still remains at the site of the helicopter attack.

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The exhibition „Mengele's Skull“ is structured around a specially commissioned book of the same title co-authored by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman. Artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl has been commissioned to respond to the proposition laid out in this book. Next to major new works by Hito Steyerl, this exhibition presents documentary and source materials.

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A film about museum guards with a background as law enforcement officers or military personnel.

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Adorno’s Grey features a single-channel video set in the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, where German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno famously taught. It shows two conservators scraping the walls of a lecture hall, looking for the legendary grey that Adorno had his classroom painted in order to promote concentration. The excavation is staged as a film set: the technical apparatus of the production is exposed and Steyerl’s directions for the excavators can be heard off camera. The video returns to an image of a camera being set up to take a photo of the lectern.

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The space of the junkyard allows various ‘crash’ narratives to unfold, with the stories of actual crashes and the remnants and afterlife of these machines becoming metaphors for economic decline. This is an investigation of planes as they are parked during the economic downturn, stored and recycled, revealing unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle, finding perfect example in the form of the Boeing 4X-JYI, an aircraft first acquired by film director Howard Hughes for TWA, which was subsequently flown by the Israeli Airforce before finding its way to the Californian desert to be blown up for the Hollywood blockbuster Speed. Through intertwined narratives of people, planes and places Steyerl reveals cycles of capitalism incorporating and adapting to the changing status of the commodity, but also points at a horizon beyond this endless repetition.

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It begins with a blank screen. The word ‘STRIKE’ appears across it, in white capital letters against a black background. Then a woman appears, dressed in black. She approaches an empty LCD monitor and strikes its undifferentiated surface once with a chisel, leaving a multi-coloured web of fractures across it, before everything fades (back) to black. It’s all over in less than 30 seconds. Then it starts again.

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If all pictures became current, in that they pass by and in doing so, are connectable with one another, whether elegantly or obscenely, through translation or association—how would it be possible to fasten down a picture? Hito Steyerl’s light-hearted picture translations are about fastening things in an elegant-obscene way: In Tokyo she is looking for a photo series that she posed for in 1987 as a “rope bondage” model. While making inquiries with experts and authorities in the bondage arts (which are mainly marketed online nowadays), she found what she was looking for in a magazine archive. The cinematic tension is extremely high just now says the translator while Steyerl looks through photos of herself from her days as a film student.

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In 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, Film Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo. Fifty years later, after the collapse of the Communist bloc, this newsreel was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. In Journal No. 1 Hito Steyerl attempts to find out how the footage got lost and what was on this document from the Sutjeska studio. In the simultaneous projection of Journal No. 1 the ‘unattainability of an historical zero hour of the national identity’ takes concrete form: The lost newsreel reports on a literacy campaign as well as Muslim women confidently removing their headscarves. We listen however to eyewitnesses trying to recapture the lost content and we see the artist Arman Kulasic making a number of drawings that resemble the story-boards for the lost film. What appears to be moments of great change remain limited by subjective and uncertain memory. The film was premiered at documenta 12.

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In the eighties, Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of exploitation films later became Wolf’s political praxis: She went to fight alongside the PKK in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq, where she was killed in 1998. Now honoured by Kurds as an “immortal revolutionary,” her portrait is carried at demonstrations.

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A short documentary about the Universal Embassy. After the collapse of the Somali government twenty years ago, its embassy in Brussels was left empty. The embassy and the sovereignty of the grounds were claimed by a group of activists who planted their own flag. This former piece of ‘Somalia’ is the only place on earth that does not belong to a country. The documentary shows how a group of people without a residence permit must live. The Universal Embassy is devoted to the cause of other homeless people, the sans papiers.

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What is declared normal by some and accepted as such by the majority sometimes represents a concrete threat to others. Normality 1-10, a series of short video essays, registers everyday neo-fascist violence as being an instrument of such "normalization." In a matter-of-fact and at the same time insistent manner, Hito Steyerl offers a richly detailed report on the growing number of anti-Semitic and racist attacks - on cemeteries, monuments and human beings - in both Austria and Germany. In a sober visual language, she develops a number of forms and styles of commentary to pose questions concerning the social structures inherent to this variety of violence and their representation. From sixpackfilm.com

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Steyerl’s film traces the impact of an influx of transnational companies on the city dwellers of Berlin in post-reunification Germany. The effect of the changing economy and politics on the city and its inhabitants is echoed through their physical relocation to its outer edges. In 1990, squatters proclaim a socialist republic on the death strip. Eight years later, the new headquarters of Mercedes Benz are built in the same location. The film makes use of slow super-impositions to uncover a journey across changing architectural and cultural boundaries. "The Empty Centre" tries to give a voice and a history to those who continue to be marginalised by the simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of the borders which they are trying to cross.

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