Hito Steyerl

If all pictures became current, in that they pass by and in doing so, are connectable with one another, whether elegantly or obscenely, through translation or association—how would it be possible to fasten down a picture? Hito Steyerl’s light-hearted picture ...  (more)

In this immersive work, which debuted at the 2015 German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Steyerl probes the pleasures and perils of image circulation in a moment defined by the unprecedented global flow of data. Ricocheting between genres—news reportage, ...  (more)

Liquidity Inc., which exhibited at the London Institute of Contemporary Art in April 2014, takes up liquidity as a concept in all of its physical, metaphorical, bodily, spiritual, meteorological and financial forms  (more)

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) mocks an instructional film on the idea of becoming invisible in the digital world.  (more)

The space of the junkyard allows various ‘crash’ narratives to unfold, with the stories of actual crashes and the remnants and afterlife of these machines becoming metaphors for economic decline. This is an investigation of planes as they are parked during the ...  (more)

In 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, Film Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo. Fifty years later, after the collapse of the Communist bloc, this newsreel was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. In Journal No. 1 Hito Steyerl ...  (more)

In the eighties, Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of ...  (more)

The film uses footage from south-eastern Turkey of the Kurdish town of Cizre on the Syrian border, which now resembles a ghost town following numerous skirmishes of escalating intensity between the government and the PKK footage from south-eastern Turkey of the ...  (more)

A three-channel video that begins with the animation of a fragmented sentence: HELL YEAH WE FUCK DIE—which, according to Billboard magazine, are the most frequently used five words in the English language music charts of the past decade. They provide the basis for ...  (more)

Hito Steyerl reveals her most recent installation in the U.S. to date, commissioned by the Armory and curated by Park Avenue Armory’s visual arts curator Tom Eccles. Steyerl utilizes both the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and historic interiors of the building in ...  (more)

Steyerl’s film traces the impact of an influx of transnational companies on the city dwellers of Berlin in post-reunification Germany. The effect of the changing economy and politics on the city and its inhabitants is echoed through their physical relocation to its ...  (more)

A short documentary about the Universal Embassy. After the collapse of the Somali government twenty years ago, its embassy in Brussels was left empty. The embassy and the sovereignty of the grounds were claimed by a group of activists who planted their own flag. ...  (more)

Adorno’s Grey features a single-channel video set in the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, where German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno famously taught. It shows two conservators scraping the walls of a lecture hall, looking for the legendary grey that Adorno had his ...  (more)

A film about museum guards with a background as law enforcement officers or military personnel.  (more)

Abstract (2012) is a return to the contested narrative of Andrea Wolf’s death, with Steyerl traveling to Kurdistan in search of information about her friend's murder. The work links cinematic shooting and military warfare together, implicating Germany’s role in the ...  (more)

Steyerl’s new lecture, pro­duced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, takes as its departure point her March 2013 talk ‘I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production’ and focuses on the arms industry, a phenomenon constantly re-conceptualized by the ...  (more)

Using video, sculpture and archival material, the work gives form to a dramatic event that took place in 1993 during the war in Bosnia, when a paramilitary unit abducted 20 people from a train. Hito Steyerl has made her mark on the international art scene as one ...  (more)

The exhibition „Mengele's Skull“ is structured around a specially commissioned book of the same title co-authored by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman. Artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl has been commissioned to respond to the proposition laid out in this book. Next to ...  (more)

It begins with a blank screen. The word ‘STRIKE’ appears across it, in white capital letters against a black background. Then a woman appears, dressed in black. She approaches an empty LCD monitor and strikes its undifferentiated surface once with a chisel, leaving ...  (more)

An oral history of Artists Space, the legendary New York artists organization. Told through the voices of the artists, critics and curators who formed it, the film is narrated by voiceover culled from 30 hours of archival cassette tape interviews over a 45 year ...  (more)