Focus Hito Steyerl

HITO STEYERL: DIGITAL TIMES, FEUDAL TIMES

Hito Steyerl is a pivotal figure in contemporary critical thought around images, technology and power. Organised jointly by the festiaval and the Museum Reina Sofia, this audiovisual series offers a chance to taker a deeper look at the work of the artist.

The series, curated by Chema González, features a master lecture by Steyerl and a selection of her films, stretching from her early documentary essays to her most recent output.  

Flecked with humour, irony and intelligence, Steyerl’s work activates a critique of digital capitalism, exploring the transformation of images in the post-truth era: how their proliferation in global networks obscures the distinction between reality and fiction, determines a new geopolitical order and blurs the limits of our intimacy. Steyerl has formulated a genre of her own combining critical theory, contemporary art and documentary film, visually blending in with the low-res aesthetic of Network images — “poor images”, as she puts it — which freely circulate with no hierarchy and regardless of quality. This aesthetic is related to a critique of art’s value in the market economy and the visual preciosity of film as a new form of academicism. 

In this series, the film-making of Steyerl elaborates on a central theme in the present time: the right to anonymity and the search for invisibility; how not to be seen in the age of total surveillance as a form of resistance under the absolute control of State, corporations and people. It also addresses other issues such as the precarity of the culture worker in the digital age, the impact of wars and militarisation on new image types and the power of artificial intelligence in our lives.

Hito Steyerl is a German film-maker and theorist. Her work is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection and the MoMA, Centre Pompidou and Tate collections, and she has also participated in documenta Kassel, the Venice Biennale and Istanbul Biennial. She is the author of The Wretched of the Screen (Sternberg Press, 2012) and Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (Verso Books, 2017).