Hito Steyerl

Last updated
Hito Steyerl
Future Affairs Berlin 2019 - ,,Digital Revolution Resetting Global Power Politics%3F" (47959578672).jpg
Steyerl in 2019
Born
Hito Steyerl

(1966-01-01) 1 January 1966 (age 58)
Munich, West Germany
(now Germany)
Nationality German
Known for
  • Filmmaker
  • visual artist
  • writer
Notable workHow Not To Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (2013)
Factory of the Sun (2015)
Movement Conceptual Art
Awards

Hito Steyerl (born 1 January 1966) is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. [1] Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. [1] She has been a professor of Current Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2024. [2] Until 2024, she was a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin. [1] [3]

Contents

Early life and career

Steyerl was born on 1 January 1966 in Munich. [4] Steyerl attended the Japan Institute of the Moving Image. [5] She later studied at the University of Television and Film Munich. [6] Steyerl was deeply influenced by Harun Farocki, [7] although she has cited her former professor, the noted film historian Helmut Färber, as having a more direct influence on her work. [5]

Work

In 2004 Steyerl participated in Manifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. [8] She has also participated in the 2008 Shanghai Biennale [9] and the 2010 Gwangju and Taipei biennials. In 2007, her film Lovely Andrea [10] was exhibited as a part of documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. [11] In 2013 her work was included in the Venice Biennale [12] and the Istanbul Biennial. [13] In 2015, her work was included in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. [14] In 2019, it was featured in the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale. [15]

Steyerl's work pushes the boundary of traditional video, often obscuring what is real beneath many layers of metaphors and satirical humor. She referred to her piece, Red Alert, as "the outer limit of video". [16] Red Alert consists of three monitors playing a video of pure red, and was commissioned to be a static representation of Steyerl's film Lovely Andrea. The color red was chosen for its connotations to terror alerts and red-light districts, referencing the themes of military violence and pornographic exploitation present in Lovely Andrea.

Her work concerns topics of militarization, surveillance migration, the role of media in globalization, and the dissemination of images and the culture surrounding it. Steyerl has pushed both the role and the label of fine artist, which is demonstrated through her tendencies and interests in engaging the presentational context of art. Her work is developed from research, interviews, and the collection of found images, culminating in pedagogically oriented work in the realm of forensic documentaries and dream-like montages.

In recent years, Steyerl's work has expanded to confront the status of images in an increasingly digital world, institutions (including museums), networks, and labor. Her work has addressed the topic of corporate sponsorship by engaging with institutions, including Drill in 2019 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, for which Steyerl revealed histories connecting the building hosting the exhibition with the founding of the National Rifle Association. On the topic of private funding, Steyerl has expressed: 'Ultimately, it will be important to move beyond protests against individuals and try to frame the problems more generally in terms of a new charter for the art world: a set of principles that include different aspects, like pay, sponsorship, governance, transparency standards, representation, sustainability, and so on, like a new deal for museums.' [17] In April 2019, Hito Steyerl incorporated an interactive app into her exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries, titled 'Power Plants', which used augmented reality to display floating data, text, and graphs around the museum space, highlighting inequalities in South Kensington, London, and erasing the Sackler name from the Serpentine Sackler Gallery entrance as a commentary on power structures in contemporary technology. [18] Steyerl employs increasingly complex approaches to pixelation within the digital sphere, editing, digital graphics, and video installation architecture. [19]

Solo exhibitions

Installation view of Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016 Hito Steyerl - Munster Skulptur Projekte PM17.jpg
Installation view of Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016

Steyerl has had numerous solo exhibitions, including:

Notable works

Videos

How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File

In 2013 Steyerl released her video How Not to Be Seen, presenting five lessons in invisibility. These lessons include how to 1. Make something invisible for a camera, 2. Be invisible in plain sight, 3. Become invisible by becoming a picture, 4. Be invisible by disappearing, and 5. Become invisible by merging into a world made of pictures. Many of these methods may seem impossible. How Not to Be Seen is a satirical take on instructional films. [46] Much of the video also deals with surveillance and digital imagery: for example, figures in all black dance around as "pixels," and aerial photography features frequently. Thus, How Not to be Seen becomes a tutorial for invisibility in an age of intense hypersurveillance.

Liquidity, Inc.

Liquidity, Inc., (from 2014) consists of a video and a seating/backdrop installation. The video includes interviews with Jason Wood, a financial-advisor-turned-MMA-fighter, mesmerizing clips of ocean waves, and mock-weather reports from characters in balaclavas. As these visuals swirl around, a metaphor forms between water and images/money/trend in the digital age. [47]

Factory of the Sun

Factory of the Sun, like Liquidity, Inc. deals with finance. In this video, which debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennial, clip art people swarm and create "artificial sunshine" for a bank. The video utilizes light, sunshine, and warmth as motifs as it explores surveillance and mega-finance.

Awards

In 2017, Steyerl was listed by ArtReview as the number one most influential person in the contemporary art world. [48] In 2023, Steyerl was again listed by ArtReview as the number two most influential person in the contemporary art world. [49]

Other awards include:

Select writings

Steyerl is a frequent contributor to online art journals such as E-flux. She has also written:

Bibliography

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Gordon</span> Scottish artist

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Kai Althoff is a German visual artist and musician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yael Bartana</span> Israeli artist, filmmaker and photographer

Yael Bartana is an Israeli artist, filmmaker and photographer, whose past works have encompassed multiple mediums, including photography, film, video, sound, and installation. Many of her pieces feature political or feminist themes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anton Vidokle</span>

Anton Vidokle is an artist and founder of e-flux. Born in 1965, Vidokle lives in New York and Berlin.

Akram Zaatari is a filmmaker, photographer, archival artist and curator. In 1997, he co-founded the Arab Image Foundation with photographers Fouad Elkoury, and Samer Mohdad. His work is largely based on collecting, studying and archiving the photographic history of the Arab World.

Mika Rottenberg is a contemporary Argentine born US based video artist who lives and works in New York. Rottenberg is best known for her video and installation work that often "investigates the link between the female body and production mechanisms". Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Post-Internet</span> 21st century art movement

Post-Internet is a 21st-century art movement involving works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society.

e-flux is a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and e-mail service founded in 1998. The arts news digests, events, exhibitions, schools, journal, books, and art projects produced and/or disseminated by e-flux describe strains of critical discourse surrounding contemporary art, culture, and theory internationally. Its monthly publication, e-flux journal, has produced essays commissioned since 2008 about cultural, political, and structural paradigms that inform contemporary artistic production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kimsooja</span> South Korean conceptual artist

Kimsooja was born in Daegu, South Korea. Kimsooja is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who travels between her three homes and places of work in New York City, Paris, and Seoul. In 1980 Kim graduated with a B.F.A in Painting from Hong-Ik University, Seoul and continued to pursue her M.F.A there, obtaining the degree in 1984 at the age of 27. Her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. That same year, she received a scholarship to study art at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, where she studied Printmaking. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1988 at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Currently, her work is featured in countless international museums and galleries as well as public art fairs and other spaces. Her practice combines performance, film, photo, and site-specific installation using textile, light, and sound. Kimsooja's work investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging issues of aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment. Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.

Karen Archey is an American art critic and curator based in New York City and Amsterdam. She is the Curator of Contemporary Art and Time-Based Media at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the former editor of e-flux.

Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist. Raised between Morocco and France, she studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fine Arts at École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

e-flux publications includes both the e-flux journal and e-flux journal reader series. The monthly art publication e-flux journal features essays and contributions by contemporary artists and thinkers. The e-flux journal reader series was initiated in 2009 as a joint imprint with Sternberg Press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Njideka Akunyili Crosby</span> Visual artist

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Through her art, Akunyili Crosby "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds". In 2017, Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Boaz M. Levin is a Berlin-based writer, curator and filmmaker. His curatorial work deals with histories of ecology and technology and the ways these have influenced visual culture. Since October 2023, he has served as Co-Head of Program and curator at C/O Berlin, together with Sophia Greiff. In 2022, Levin was co-curator of the 3rd Chennai Photo Biennale. In 2017, he was co-curator together with Florian Ebner, Kerstin Meinicke, Kathrin Schonegg, and Christin Müller of the 7th edition of the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, which takes place in Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg. He is an editor of Cabinet Magazine's Kiosk. His essay, "On Distance", was published by Atlas Projectos, Berlin, as part of the Next Spring series of occasional reviews.His writing has been published by magazines such as Camera Austria, Texte Zur Künst, and Frieze. He is an AICA, and has been an ICOM member. Levin has curated exhibitions at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Heidelberger Kunstverein, The Jewish Museum Munich, and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, KunstHausWien, and C/O Berlin, among other venues. Levin is the co-founder, together with Vera Tollmann and Hito Steyerl, of the Research Center for Proxy Politics.

Cécile B. Evans is a Belgian-American artist who lives and works in London. Evans is known for their use of video, installation, sculpture and performance, focusing on the value of emotion in contemporary society and its rebellion as it comes into contact with physical, ideological, and technological structures.

Michael E. Smith is an American artist whose minimal sculptures often juxtapose appropriated, discarded everyday items found in urban decay and on eBay. His works have been shown in MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum and the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Ramin, Rokni, Hesam are a UAE-based artist collective from Iran, consisting of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian who's working and living together described as a project, since 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">B3 Biennial of the Moving Image</span> Creative festival that takes place in Germany

The B3 Biennial of the Moving Image is a cross-media moving image festival in Frankfurt, Germany. It features films, media art, games, and artistic confrontations with VR, AR and MR by international artists and creative minds. The main focus of the biennial is on the international discourse on the moving image and the developments in storytelling in the digital age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Lind</span> Swedish art historian, art critic and curator

Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator from Sweden. From 2020 to 2023, Lind served as the counsellor of culture at the embassy of Sweden in Moscow. Prior to that, she was the director of Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall (2011-2018), the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, director of IASPIS in Stockholm (2005-2007). Since 2023, she is the director of Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna.

Ivana Franke is a Croatian contemporary visual artist who currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Hito Steyerl", e-flux, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  2. ↑ Vogel, Evelyn (2024-07-04). "Neues Forschungszentrum für Technoästhetik an der Münchner Kunstakademie". Süddeutsche.de (in German). Retrieved 2024-07-20.
  3. ↑ "Research Center for Proxy Politics". rcpp.lensbased.net. Retrieved 2016-12-29.
  4. ↑ "document 12" Archived 2014-11-13 at the Wayback Machine , documenta 12, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  5. 1 2 Steyerl, Hito. "Life in Film" Archived 2014-08-10 at the Wayback Machine , e-flux, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  6. ↑ Gray, Maggie. "Artist profile: Hito Steyerl", thisistomorrow, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  7. ↑ "Beginnings – Journal #59 November 2014 – e-flux". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved 2018-07-22.
  8. ↑ "Manifesta 5 artists" Archived 2014-08-12 at the Wayback Machine , Manifesta, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  9. ↑ "Hito Steyerl DeriVeD (2008) 7th Shanghai Biennial", vimeo, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  10. 1 2 "U B U W E B – Film & Video: Hito Steyerl – Lovely Andrea (2007)". www.ubu.com. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  11. ↑ "documents 12: overviewd" Archived 2014-11-13 at the Wayback Machine , documents 12, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  12. ↑ "Hito Steyerl: Biography", Andrew Kreps Gallery, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  13. ↑ Milliard, Coline (December 1, 2013). "13th Istanbul Biennial". Modern Painters.
  14. ↑ Sinibaldi, Christian (2015-05-07). "In-yer-face art: the best of Venice Biennale 2015 – in pictures". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2022-11-11.
  15. ↑ Arsenale, Central Pavilion / (2019-05-15). "Biennale Arte 2019 | Hito Steyerl". La Biennale di Venezia. Retrieved 2020-01-05.
  16. 1 2 dmovies.net (2013-06-12), Hito Steyerl, interview at Documenta 12 , retrieved 2017-03-29
  17. ↑ Zefkili, Despina (18 October 2019). "Hito Steyerl: How To Build a Sustainable Art World". Ocula.
  18. ↑ "App art — a playground for new ideas". www.ft.com. Retrieved 2023-12-28.
  19. ↑ "Liquidity Inc. | icaboston.org". www.icaboston.org. Retrieved 2019-03-23.
  20. ↑ "Archive Past Exhibitions Hito Steyerl" Archived 2014-11-13 at the Wayback Machine , Chisehale Gallery, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  21. ↑ Cotter, Holland. "Hito Steyerl Has New York Solo Debut at e-flux", The New York Times, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  22. ↑ "focus: Hito Steyerl", Art Institute of Chicago, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  23. ↑ "Van Abbemuseum: Detail" Archived 2014-11-13 at the Wayback Machine , Van Abbemuseum, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  24. ↑ "What's On: Hito Steyerl" Archived 2014-11-13 at the Wayback Machine , ICA London, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  25. ↑ Exposición: En defensa de la imagen pobre Archived 2014-11-29 at the Wayback Machine , Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Retrieved 21 November 2014.
  26. ↑ Proyecciones: Arte, control y dominación. 3 películas de Hito Steyerl Archived 2014-11-29 at the Wayback Machine , Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Retrieved 21 November 2014.
  27. ↑ Gallery, Andrew Kreps. "Andrew Kreps Gallery". Andrew Kreps Gallery. Archived from the original on 2016-02-28. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  28. ↑ "Hito Steyerl", Artists Space Exhibitions, Retrieved 31 May 2015.
  29. ↑ "Hito Steyerl – Exhibitions – KOW". www.kow-berlin.info. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  30. ↑ "Hito Steyerl. Duty-Free Art". www.museoreinasofia.es. Retrieved 2016-04-08.
  31. ↑ "Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun". The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Retrieved 2016-02-26.
  32. ↑ "Hito Steyerl: Power Plants". Serpentine Galleries. Retrieved 2022-10-21.
  33. ↑ "Hito Steyerl: This is the Future" . Retrieved 2020-02-09.
  34. ↑ Grrr.nl. "Exhibition Hito Steyerl: I will survive at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam". www.stedelijk.nl. Retrieved 2022-10-21.
  35. ↑ "MoMA | Hito Steyerl's HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A F**king Didactic Educational .MOV File". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  36. ↑ "Is the Museum a Battlefield". Vimeo. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  37. ↑ "Selected Works – Hito Steyerl – Artists – KOW". www.kow-berlin.info. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  38. ↑ "Hito Steyerl at the Art Institute of Chicago" . Retrieved 2023-06-22.
  39. ↑ "Liquidity Inc. | icaboston.org". www.icaboston.org. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  40. ↑ "Selected Works – Hito Steyerl – Artists – KOW". www.kow-berlin.info. Retrieved 2017-04-11.
  41. ↑ "Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun". The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  42. ↑ Farago, Jason (5 July 2019). "In 'Drill,' Hito Steyerl Adds Polish to Images of a World Gone Mad". The New York Times.
  43. ↑ "Drill : Program & Events".
  44. 1 2 Oltermann, Philip (23 June 2023). "Out of the shadows". The Guardian Weekly . pp. 52–53.
  45. ↑ Oltermann, Philip; @philipoltermann (2023-06-13). "Post-internet artist Hito Steyerl on refusing honours, buying her work back – and fighting big tech". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-06-26.
  46. ↑ "MoMA | Hito Steyerl. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. 2013". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2019-03-23.
  47. ↑ "Liquidity Inc. | icaboston.org". www.icaboston.org. Retrieved 2019-05-02.
  48. ↑ "power 100 / ArtReview". artreview.com. Retrieved 2020-01-05.
  49. ↑ "Power 100". artreview.com. Retrieved 2023-12-08.
  50. ↑ Knegt, Peter. "Thinking Outside the Doc Box", Indiewire, Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  51. ↑ "Hito Steyerl wins the inaugural EYE Prize". e-flux. e-flux. Retrieved 9 September 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.