Hito Steyerl

Abstract marks Steyerl’s transition from documentary language to the contemporary grammar of the image: a video-dialogue between two screens with images and texts based on the film technique of shot and counter-shot, where the violence of war and the artist’s own history are interwoven. In one of the screens, she revisits the place in which her friend Andrea Wolf, a member of the Kurdish resistance, was shot dead in 1998 by the Turkish Army. In the other, she films the offices of Lockheed Martin, an arms manufacturer and dealer in the war that killed her friend.

In How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File drawings of military calibration satellites in the California desert preface a parody on how not to be seen in the age of global surveillance. Liquidity Inc., meanwhile, is a razor-sharp film on the economic crisis, martial arts, financial trading, information flows and bioclimatic systems. These are two of Steyerl’s most inventive and comical films, and also clear-eyed reflections on the economy of speculation, financial abstraction and global surveillance.

In SocialSim, a delirious exploration of the immersive aesthetic and worlds created by artificial intelligence, Steyerl transports the viewer to a space inhabited by police and workers as 3D avatars, activated in a choreography programmed from data on police violence. Factory of the Sun, meanwhile, is an exercise in speculation through science fiction: humans live trapped in a future where body and time is monetised as a new form of control and survival. The film thus reflects on digital labour exploitation via a hacker who attempts to escape this oppressive environment. Finally, In Free Fall charts the cycle of destruction, re-use and recycling in the history of a Boeing 707 to reflect on a capitalism in which everything is consumed, transformed and re-sold.

The series concludes with two medium-length films stretching back to Steyerl’s documentary-making origins. November is a reflection on the decline of revolution by way of the friendship between the artist and Andrea Wolf — her childhood friend who became a Kurdish guerrilla and was murdered by the Turkish Army in 1998 — and combines amateur film, archive material and fragments from a martial arts film they both shot. In Lovely Andrea Steyerl travels to Tokyo in search of an erotic bondage photograph she posed for when she was a student to set forth a reflection on how the female body is represented and controlled in contemporary society.