Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl is a German artist based in Berlin where she works as a filmmaker and author in the area of essayist documentary film and video, media art and video installation. The works are located at the interface between cinema and fine arts and between theory and practice. They center on the question of media within globalisation and the migration of sounds and images. Hito Steyerl’s films and essays take the digital image as a point of departure for entering a world in which a politics of dazzle manifests as collective desire. This is to say that when war, genocide, capital flows, digital detritus, and class warfare always take place partially within images, we are no longer dealing with the virtual but with a confusing and possibly alien concreteness that we are only beginning to understand. Today the image world, Steyerl reminds us, is far from flat. And paradoxically it may be in its most trashy and hollowed out spots that we can locate its ethics. Because this is where forms run free and the altogether unseen and unrecognized toy with political projects at the speed of light. It is where spectacle and poverty merge, then split, then dance.

 Hito Steyerl, born 1966, is a German artist based in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions and biennials include Hito Steyerl at the ICA in London and Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven (2014), 35 ways to break through a wall at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2014), Hito Steyerl: How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational Installation at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York (2014),Il Palazzo Enciclopedico at the Venice Biennial (2013), the 13^th Istanbul Biennial (2013), Hito Steyerl: Guards at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (2013), the Gwangju Biennale (2010) and Taipei Biennial (2010). Selected group shows include Smart New World at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2014), Hntbs By Hito Steyerl at Kunstverein Stuttgart (2014), Politics Within at the Center for Contemporary Art in Celje (2014),The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archeology at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2013), Image Employment at Moma PS1 in New York (2013), The ICP Triennial in New York (2013), Momentous Times at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry (2013), Videonale 14 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2013), Remote Control at the ICA in London
(2012), Mengele’s Skull at Portikus in Frankfurt (2012), BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM 2 at Haus der Kulturen in Berlin (2012), Probable title: zero probability at Tate Modern in London (2012), Motion at Seventeen Gallery in London (2012), Seeing is believing at Kunstwerke in Berlin (2011) and Big Picture II (Zeitzonen) at Kunstsammlung im Ständehaus in Düsseldorf (2011).She is a professor at Universität de Kunst Berlin and a visiting professor at the Dutch Art Institute, Malmö Art Academy, Akademie der bildenden Kuenste Wien, Royal Art Academy Copenhagen, Goldsmiths College London, Bard College and Helsinki Art Academy.  She has written a book about documentary in the art field and edited several others.