Friday, 20 December 2013, 24:00 | midnight

#50: Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl works as filmmaker, visual artist and author in the area of essayist documentary film, postcolonial criticism, as producer as well as theorist. The works are located on the interface between film and fine arts. Main topics: cultural globalisation, political theory, global feminism, and migration. The films have received international awards and are screened on TV in many countries. Steyerl is a frequent lecturer, has published influencial writings, and participated in numerous international exhibitions and biennials. She exhibited at documenta 12 in 2007 and in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015.

Adorno’s Grey, 2012, 15:00 min
“Who is this person? She clearly doesn’t have any clue about Adorno, philosophy, cinema or art.  The only thing that matters in this work are tits!“ – Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

“This work is awesome! Nothing but tits!” – Jerry Saltz, Vulture

Guards, 2012, 25:00 min
“Another reason for increase of control in museums (for instance, installation of numerous cameras, metal detectors and employing people with military backgrounds) is marketization and commercialization of art in the last few decades. When art starts to function as a means of capital investment or tax avoidance, its priorities, values and conventions more and more detach. Objects of contemporary art that represent nothing but the omnivoracity and conceit of the rich, need increasing protection. (..)Security guards that we see so often in museums are the materialization of a Benjaminian aura that would keep the public at a distance in a very literal and prosaic way. (..)The gallery space turns out to be a concentration of different forces, a professionally supervised and monitored sphere of unresolved tensions and irreconcilable interests.

(..)Steyerl like a burglar comes into a museum with an aerosol can, pulls it out into the air, and reveals invisible beams of laser alarms.“ – Andrey Shental, Through the Laser Field

How Not To Bee Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File, 2013, 15:00 min
“Composed of a variety of lessons, for the most part incanted by two cyborgian-mildly-English-accented MAC computerized readers, one male and one female, the video obviously riffs off really fucking didactic educational videos, but it quickly dispenses with any pretension toward the flat-footed nature of such productions. (..)Therefore, as a cyborg states while the piece cuts to dancers with one-foot cubes on their heads, “to become invisible, one has to become smaller or equal to one pixel.” The video is friendly, colorful, and appealing, but also sinister, the dancing cubes are easily applicable to Muslim families and friends on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan or in Southern Yemen, targeted by extra-judicial US drone attacks. They really need to be invisible to survive.” If You are Willing; The Army of Individuals, Bartholomew Ryan.


Hito Steyerl
(b. 1966 in Munich, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She is one of the most critically acclaimed artists working in the field of video today. Her work straddles the borders between cinema and fine arts, and between theory and practice, exploring issues of militarization, the role of the media in globalization, and the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies.

The Van Abbe Museum in Amsterdam recently presented her first large-scale mid-career survey show. In the last year, she has had solo exhibitions at both the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London. Her work has been included in the 2013 Venice Biennale and Istanbul Biennial, the 2010 Gwangju and Taipei biennials, the 2008 Shanghai Biennale, Documenta 12, Kassel, in 2007 and Manifesta 5 in 2004.  Her book The Wretched of the Screen, published by e-flux and the Sternberg Press (2012), has garnered critical attention. Steyerl is a professor of Art and Multimedia at the Berlin University of the Arts.

 After the screening we will celebrate our 5th anniversary at the Café Luxemburg (next to the Babylon). Safy Sniper will putting on music – and you hopefully will joining us!