PRESENTATION: Hito Steyerl-I Will Survive

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her prolific filmmaking and writing occupies a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have increasingly addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals, often online.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive

Hito Steyerl operates on the boundary between film and visual art, working in genres ranging from documentary cinema to innovative multimedia installations. Her rigorously researched and visually stunning installations illuminate some of the most pressing issues of our time. The major solo exhibition “I Will Survive” opens at the Stedelijk Museum, offering an expansive overview of Hito Steyerl’s oeuvre, from the early documentary works of the 1990s to architectural video installations of the past 10 years. With twenty loans supplemented by two works that the Stedelijk acquired in 2014 in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum. “SocialSim” (2020), is a site-specific video installation that premiered at K21. The installation includes an immersive projected live simulation and a video presented in two adjacent darkened rooms divided by a wall, also used as a projection surface. In both rooms the floor is covered with reflective black vinyl that mirrors the projections. In the first room, a live simulation of Computer-Generated Images feature dancing figures of police officers in uniform and riot gears for “Dancing Mania”, of police officers and construction workers for “Rebellion”. Their movements recall contemporary urban dance routines but have a deliberate awkwardness. Their dancing pace is determined by statistical data about instances of police brutality. “SocialSim”, is articulated in the form of a narrative video that combines multiple sources and aesthetics: video games, data visualization techniques, live online chatrooms, sequences created by neural networks/Artificial Intelligence, found imagery, and excerpts of previous works by Hito Steyerl. Taking the tone of a thriller serial, the film begins with an announcement that the most expensive painting in the world is missing (a reference to “Salvator Mundi” attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that recently sold for USD 450 millions) and that a force squad is sent to rescue. The search leads to a 3D-rendered exhibition spaces and online viewing rooms that present virtual and ‘self-generating’ artworks. Steyerl in “Factory of the Sun” (2015), which debuted when the artist represented Germany at the 2015 Venice Biennale, probes the pleasures and perils of image circulation in a moment defined by the unprecedented global flow of data. Ricocheting between genres—news reportage, documentary film, video games, and internet dance videos “Factory of the Sun” uses the motifs of light and acceleration to explore what possibilities are still available for collective resistance when surveillance has become a mundane part of an increasingly virtual world. The work tells the surreal story of workers whose forced moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine. The video “Liquidity Inc.” (2014) is a multilayered portrait of Jacob Wood, a financial analyst who lost his job in the economic crash of 2008 and became a career mixed-martial-arts fighter. Wood’s story unfolds through real and virtual worlds that are made to overlap, combining conventions of documentary film with Internet syntax—hashtags, GIFs, and memes. With its computer-generated waves and news footage of hurricanes and tsunamis, the work uses water and extreme weather as metaphors for the fluidity of financial assets and digital information, and for a collective sense of instability. Conflating terms from meteorology, geopolitics, and digital culture, masked forecasters wryly suggest that weather patterns are determined by our own emotional states. You are invited to sit on the architectural structure, lined with judo mats, which the artist has compared to a raft wrecked by a raging storm. “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File” (2013) presents five lessons in invisibility. As titles that divide the video into distinct but interrelated sections, these lessons include how to: 1. Make something invisible for a camera, 2. Be invisible in plain sight, 3. Become invisible by becoming a picture, 4. Be invisible by disappearing, and 5. Become invisible by merging into a world made of pictures. Some of these methods may seem impossible. How, for example, can someone in plain sight go unseen? Steyerl herself often ponders this question. Her work is fueled by her critical examination of the production, use, and circulation of images from the mid-twentieth century into the Information Age. Referring to the countless images generated and circulated by such sources as social media and surveillance technologies, and the impact of these technologies on our lives, she asks: “How do people disappear in an age of total over-visibility?…Are people hidden by too many images?…Do they become images?” A satirical take on instructional films, “How Not to Be Seen” features a mix of actual and virtual performers and scenes, which illustrate the strategies for becoming invisible, communicated in an authoritative narrative voiceover. In the fourth lesson, the narrator outlines ways of disappearing, ncluding “living in a gated community” or “being a disappeared person as an enemy of the state”3, while panning shots of architectural renderings of luxury living and public spaces, populated largely by computer-generated people, unfold across the screen. Among the video’s central symbols is a real place: a patch of marked concrete in the California desert once used by the U.S. Air Force to calibrate their surveillance cameras. The concrete is riddled with cracks and desert scrub. As the artist indicates throughout her video, sites like this have fallen into disrepair not because surveillance has stopped, but because more advanced systems are now in use, which do not need to be tested there. These newer systems ensure that we are always visible, and might benefit from her lessons in “How Not to Be Seen”.

Photo: Installation view “Hito Steyerl. I Will Survive”, Stedelijk Museum-Amsterdam, 2022. Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, Miloš Trakilović, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE, 2019. Courtesy the artists, Esther Schipper-Berlin and Andrew Kreps Gallery-New York. Photo: Peter Tijhuis. © Hito Steyerl

Info: Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 29/1-12/6/2022, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, www.stedelijk.nl