Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl (2019)

UNTER UNS Linz 09 , installation (2009)

Hito Steyerl (* 1966 in Munich ) is a German filmmaker and author who deals with questions of postcolonial criticism and feminist representational criticism in essayistic documentaries and texts . Her works move at the interface between film and visual arts as well as between theory and practice. In the field of art she works as a commentator, critic and lecturer - currently as a professor for media art at the Berlin University of the Arts . Her films are shown worldwide at numerous film festivals and art exhibitions, most recently she was a participant ofSculpture projects in Münster (2017), at the Venice Biennale (2015) and documenta 12 in Kassel (2007). In 2017, the art magazine ArtReview included Steyerl on the annual “Power100” list as the most influential player in the international art world. This makes her the first woman as well as the performing artist to top the ranking. In 2019, Hito Steyerl received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, endowed with 12,000 euros .

Life

Steyerl studied cinematography and documentary film directing at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo from 1987 to 1990 with Imamura Shohei and Hara Kazuo. In 1990/1991 she worked in Wim Wenders' team as an assistant director and technical coordinator for the film Until the End of the World in Australia, Japan, France, USA, Italy, Portugal and Germany. From 1992 to 1998 she studied documentary film directing at the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF); In 2003 she did her PhD in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In addition to her artistic work, she taught at the Center for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College in London and has been a professor at the University of the Arts Berlin since 2010 (lens-based class). In collaboration with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin, she founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics located there . Steyerl lives with her daughter in Berlin.

Works

Her first short and medium-length documentaries - Germany and the Self (1994), Land of Smiles (1996) and Babenhausen (1997) - thematized anti-Semitism, racism and neo-Nazism in reunified Germany. Steyerl's first long essay film The Empty Center from 1998 made Potsdamer Platz in Berlin legible as a symbolic intersection of historical and current conflicts. The former center of the capital of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi state became a mined border territory during the Cold War . Steyerl's film traces how various actors - squatters, former residents, transnational companies - competed for the power to interpret the place, which had returned to the center , after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 . The empty middle makes the process of urban restructuring under the sign of the economic-political " reunification " of Germany and global power shifts visible in a specific place. Where the company management of Mercedes-Benz ultimately symbolically dominates, the film records stories on the exclusion of which the dominant representation was built - such as that of German Jews and immigrants. Montage of footage sequences, slow cross-fades, semi-documentary stagings and reflective commentary formed the instruments of Steyerl's cinematic archeology.

Normality 1-10

The episode film Normalität 1–10 was made between 1999 and 2001 and represents a chronology of mostly anti-Semitic acts of violence in post-Wende Germany (and Austria). “In this context, Steyerl takes a clear political position: It is important to break through the silent acceptance, the opportune racist consensus. But normality also shows how migrants - who come here not least because of Europe's involvement in global capitalism - claim their rights and remind us: 'Your silence is encouraging fascism, telling the fascists that it's okay what they are doing'. " (Thomas Korschil) The compilation was revised in 2005.

November

November (2004) is an essayistic consideration of "traveling images" (Steyerl):

“In the eighties, Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super 8 material . Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the main role of a combative woman in leather clothing and with a motorcycle. The commitment, which was then expressed in the formal language of the exploitation film, later became entirely political practice for Andrea Wolf: She went to the Kurdish areas between Turkey and Northern Iraq as a fighter on the PKK side , where she was killed in 1998. In Kurdish circles she is revered as an 'immortal revolutionary', and her image is carried on demonstrations. In 'November', Steyerl examines the interrelationships between territorial power politics (as practiced by Turkey in Kurdistan with support from Germany) and individual forms of resistance. The memories of the girlfriend and the testimonies of her life provoke the filmmaker to a fundamental reflection: She understands how factual and fictional relationships merge into one another in global discourse. The image of the girlfriend as a revolutionary pin-up can be linked to Asian genre cinema and private video documents alike. If 'October' is the revolutionary hour, then 'November' is the disillusionment afterwards, but also the time of madness - from this position Hito Steyerl thinks about a relationship that started with a pose, the implications of which are Andrea Wolf took seriously the fact that she no longer wanted to be satisfied with symbolic practice. Andrea Wolf chose the other side of filmmaking and became an 'icon'. "

- Bert Rebhandl

The film premiered at Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian and quickly achieved cult status.

Journal No. 1

In the short essay film Journal No. 1 - Artist's Impression is about a fundamental reflection on the status of the historical document, as well as the role of the witness in historiography. The motto of this film is: "A witness is not a witness", an old Roman legal principle that only believes the witness when a second corresponding testimony is found. This motto is subjected to an experimental test in the course of the film:

“Two years after the Second World War, the 'Film-Journal No. 1 'published four years after the end of the communist bloc, this newsreel, which was only transmitted on nitrate film, was lost in the turmoil of the war in Yugoslavia. Hito Steyerl tries in 'Journal No. 1 - An artist's impression 'to find out what was shown on this film document from the Sutjeska studio in Sarajevo. She has eyewitnesses speak about it, and the artist Arman Kulasic makes several drawings according to her statements, which look like storyboards for a lost film. In the parallel projection of 'Journal No. 1 - An artist's impression 'the unattainable of a historical zero point of national identity becomes concrete: what appears in retrospect as a moment of departure (the newsreel was about a literacy campaign, the Muslim women confidently took off their headscarves, the communist Yugoslavia under Tito celebrates in his early films a modernization through education), remains subject to subjective memory. Instead, the draftsman, who should actually only serve as a 'medium' for the off-screen voices, wins a voice himself: He was also affected by the ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav war. Hito Steyerl uses film images from the Sutjeska Studio (the anti-fascist 'Walter saves Sarajewo' or ' Do you remember Dolly Bell? ' By Emir Kusturica) where the documentary image is missing, without ever aiming at a complete reconstruction: the multi-ethnic Yugoslavia remains historically and historically a fragment, a land between the images. "

- Bert Rebhandl

The film premiered at documenta 12 and has since screened at numerous film festivals and in various exhibitions in Toronto, Linz, Amsterdam, Marseille and other locations, as well as in 2011 in the IG high-rise on the Westend campus of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

Lovely Andrea

The video installation Lovely Andrea describes the artist's search for bondage photos actually taken in Tokyo in 1987, which she herself shows as the bottom of Nawa Shibari . Her search leads her through the city's bondage scene and sex archives, among other things. As a 19-year-old, Steyerl had worked as a bondage model during her student days in Japan and said in interviews that she later thought about the pornography of politics associated with it in connection with pictures from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib . From her point of view, you are "... dealing with a kind of political bondage of unimaginable proportions." Some reviews suggested that it was not a bondage video but a reflection on the sex industry and the colonization of the senses. A few weeks before the opening of documenta 12, the teaser of the video caused a sensation because it had been set as a YouTube window under the URL of the art exhibition instead of the documenta website . In parts of the German press, this raised the question of whether the website had been hacked or whether it was a public relations measure. The film was later projected in the Museum Fridericianum .

Red Alert

At documenta 12 in 2007, Steyerl was also represented with the installation Red Alert in the Aue Pavilion. Red Alert apparently showed three orange-red images that were actually screens hanging on the wall that only emitted pure color. It was the color used by the United States Department of Homeland Security to indicate the highest level of terrorism warning. Formally, the work took up a monochrome series by Aleksander Rodchenko from 1921. Rodchenko had declared at the time that he had reached the end of painting. According to Steyerl, Red Alert is negotiating a similar limit for the video medium. According to press reports, this work is one of the five works that will remain permanently in Kassel as a representative of the d12.

Filmography (selection)

• 1994: Germany and the self
• 1996: Land of Smiles
• 1997: Babenhausen
• 1998: the empty center
• 1999: normality 1-10
• 2004: November
• 2007: Lovely Andrea
• 2007: Journal No. 1
• 2009: After the crash
• 2010: In Free Fall
• 2012: Abstract
• 2012: Adorno's Gray
• 2012: Guards
• 2013: How not to be seen: a fucking didactic .MOV file
• 2014: Liquidity Inc.
• 2015: Factory of the Sun
• 2015: The Tower

Exhibitions (selection)

• 2009: Hito Steyerl , Neuer Berliner Kunstverein , Berlin
• 2010: Hito Steyerl , Chisenhale Gallery, London
• 2012: Hito Steyerl , Art Institute of Chicago , Chicago
• 2014: Hito Steyerl , Van Abbemuseum , Amsterdam
• 2014: Hito Steyerl. , Institute of Contemporary Arts , London
• 2015: Hito Steyerl , Artists Space, New York
• 2015: Hito Steyerl: Duty-Free Art , Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía , Madrid
• 2016: Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun , Museum of Contemporary Art , Los Angeles
• 2016: Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun , Hartware MedienKunstVerein im Dortmunder U (level 6, gallery), Dortmund
• 2019: Hito Steyerl: This Is the Future , Art Gallery of Ontario , Toronto
• 2019: Hito Steyerl , Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin

Literature (primary)

Books

• "Does the subaltern speak German?" Postcolonial Criticism and Migration. Unrast Verlag , Münster 2003 (Ed. Together with Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez)
• The color of truth. Documentarisms in the art field. (Series: republicart, 8) Turia + Kant , Vienna 2008, new edition. 2017 ISBN 978-3-85132-517-1
• The Greenroom. Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art # 1 . Annandale-on-Hudson: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Sternberg Press, Berlin 2008 (Ed. With Maria Lind )
• The Wretched of the Screen ( E-Flux Journal Series). Sternberg Press, Berlin 2012
• Beyond Representation. Essays 1999-2009 . Ed. Marius Babias, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Walther König, Cologne 2016
• Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War . Verso, London 2017. Dt. Edition: Duty Free Art. Art in times of global civil war . Translated by Sabine Schulz. Diaphanes , Zurich 2018. https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/duty-free-art-5387

Catalogs (selection)

• Hito Steyerl. Ed. Marius Babias , exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein , August - October 2009. Walther König, Cologne 2010
• Ricochet # 3: Hito Steyerl. Ed. Michael Buhrs, Exhibition Museum Villa Stuck , July - September 2010. Kerber, Bielefeld 2010
• Too Much World. The Films of Hito Steyerl . Ed. Nick Aikens, Van Abbemuseum exhibition , Eindhoven; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Sternberg Press, Berlin 2014
• Hito Steyerl. Circulacionismo / Circulationism . Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 2014
• Hito Steyerl. Duty-Free Art . Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía , Madrid 2015
• Hito Steyerl. The City of Broken Windows . Ed. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev , exhibition Castello di Rivoli , Turin. Skira, Milan 2019
• Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019. Hito Steyerl . Academy of Arts , Berlin 2019
• Hito Steyerl. This is the future . Ed. Adelina Vlas, Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition , Toronto. New York: Prestel 2019

Article (selection)

• The Empty Center. In: Ursula Biemann , Ed .: Stuff it: The Video Essay in the Digital Age. Voldemeer , Zurich 2003
• Documentarism as the Politics of Truth. In: Gerald Raunig (ed.): Image spaces and spatial images. Representative criticism in film and activism . Turia + Kant, Vienna 2004
• The presence of the subaltern. Foreword in: Gayatri Spivak : Can the Subaltern Speak? Post-colonialism and subaltern articulation. Turia + Kant, Vienna 2008

Literature (secondary)

• Paul Buckermann: Uncritical entanglements. She does not address what is problematic about her partial financing by Julia Stoschek , Jungle World / Dschungel , 50, 13 December 2018, p. 12f. ( online )

Web links

Commons : Hito Steyerl  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Hito Steyerl in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Sculpture Projects 2017 , Steyerl with the work HellYeahWeFuckDie
• Materials by and about Hito Steyerl in the documenta archive
• Steyerl in the Wilfried Lentz Gallery, Rotterdam
• Steyerl website of documenta12
• Art without a false facade , the standard about the installation “Unter uns” near Linz 09
• Research Center for Proxy Politics
• 'Why Games? Can an Art Professional Think? '. Video conference | Hito Steyerl | Fundació Antoni Tàpies museum, Barcelona, ​​2016. In English

swell

1. ↑ See kunstaspekte.de: Hito Steyerl
2. ↑ The Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019 of the Academy of Arts goes to Hito Steyerl. Akademie der Künste (Berlin) , October 25, 2018, accessed on October 26, 2018 . 
3. ^ Research Center for Proxy Politics. In: rcpp.lensbased.net. Retrieved December 28, 2016 . 
4. ↑ Christina Gerhardt: Transnational Germany: Hito Steyerl's Film The Empty Middle and Two Hundred Years of Border Crossings. Women in German Yearbook 23 (2007): 205-223. Online at [1]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Sixpack Film Wien ( Memento of the original from August 9, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ A short excerpt and Hito Steyerl's treatment of the film with numerous visual materials can be found on the website of the Department of German at the University of California at Berkeley Archive link ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link became automatic used and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Sixpack Film Wien ( Memento of the original from August 9, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ Sixpack Film Vienna  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ Christoph Bannat: Theory from Self-Defense - A conversation with the documenta artist Hito Steyerl , June 14, 2007, online at artnet.com  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
10. ↑ hr-online.de: Hito Steyerl: “Lovely Andrea” , under: Page no longer available , search in web archives: hr-online.de , May 28, 2007.
11. ↑ Reviews of the film can be found e.g. B. under Austrian Independent Film and Video Database ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. or under Archive Link ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
12. ↑ cf. also Ingo Arend The invocation of the senses , in: KUNSTFORUM International; "THE DOCUMENTA 12"; Volume 187, pp. 79-81, August-September 2007, Ruppichteroth 2007.
13. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung : At the start of the documenta - Sado-Maso in Kassel , No. 107, May 10, 2007, online
14. ^ Announcement on the exhibition ( Memento of the original from June 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed August 30, 2014.