Hito Steyerl - a short portrait

The video artist Hito Steyerl is one of the most important contemporary artists in the world .

In 2017, Steyerl from the British art magazine Artreview put at the top of the "Power100" list. An honor for Hito Steyerl, but also makes it clear that this list of "most influential people in the current art world" is not primarily about art: Hito Steyerl is one of the few active artists who have been able to achieve a top position in this list.

Before her, only Damien Hirst (2005 + 2008) and Ai Wei Wei (2011) was granted because the "kings" of the international mega galleries, mega-museums and mega art spectacles share the front ranks in a kind of tree change. With these top positions, Artreview has made it clear since 2002 that her ranking of the stock exchange is closer than art.

In 2016/2017, those interested in art in the art world were already groaning their commercial abrasion; And the whole world bubbled tremendously among completely different would-be kings ... So those responsible for the Artreview almost became Robin Hoods of art when they put an artist at the top in 2017, who sees "virtual reality platforms as a training program to adapt to people to a world in which he is increasingly missing" and in the "natural mode of a (social) calibration, which acts skilfully from the Periphery strikes "

The idea of ​​ARTREVIEW was almost prophetic to put a woman at the top of the ranking in 2017: the hashtag #metoo (which not only revealed the current extent of sexual harassment, but also emphasized again that equality in the world of "power people" was a foreign word) only entered the stage in mid-October 2017 ...

The Robin Hood manner of the ArTreview exposes itself as soon as the reader from other sources learns that Hito Steyerl is the first woman to have ranking since 2002; After this slip, David Zwirner will again be at the top David Zwirner

The world's best list of art that is more about art is published by artfacts.net. There is also more about equality ( Artfacts.Net GmbH was founded and is managed by the managing directors Marek Claassen and Stine Albertsen), and it is even more about democracy: The Artfacts Ranking measures the position of an artist based on his exhibition history because the great work that arises in some quiet combing can be assessed so badly.

However, it has this exhibition presence evaluated by a complex algorithm, to which it was said that it can spit a few more points for the MoMA-Exhibition than for the exhibition in the rural art association.

Artificial Facts thus countered the new distrust of the old media early on: towards the end of the rule of the "uncontrolled and uncontrollable gentlemen", many readers/art lovers consider it possible without further ado that critics want to deliberately bush certain artists through high ranking spaces; For speculative reasons, boasting with insider knowledge or other reasons that have to do with injured vanity.

This danger is banned by applying an algorithm, the concentrated knowledge of all critics still flows through their participation in preparation for exhibitions etc. ... The problem of "false marketing" of art is certainly unable to solve the algorithm, but within the given state this ranking does a lot for the credibility of art assessment.

On this list, Hito Steyerl as an artist No. 118 (the world!) , Your chart has been showing an ascending trend for years. It is enough, and Hito Steyerl is probably not much because of rankings anyway (except that they encourage more people to approach their not very simple art). Because Hito Steyerl does not make art for the masses, but intellectual art at its finest; Your artistic work and texts are ingenious analyzes of the current sociopolitical conditions,

How did the Hito Steyerl get art?

Hito Steyerl was born in Munich in 1966 and has noticed a lot of the "Neue German Film" , who, with directors such as Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the 1950 home film, Karl-May, Schlager and Edgar Wallace-Krimis in socially critical and political films in the sense of the French "Nouvelle Vague ” and the 1968 protest movement wanted to counter.

From 1987 to 1990 Steyerl studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, Japan Kinematography and documentary director at Imamura Shohei and Hara Kazuo . The famous and controversial New Wave Director Imamura Shoei headed this unusual film school on the outskirts of Tokyo, which was open to school leavers.

Japanese documentary filmmaker Hara Kazuo had broken off his studies to work at a special school and often documented people who face the narrow limits of decency and obedience in Japanese society. Nobody in the Japanese film industry had dealt with these directors, the school of Imamura was also one of the few places where the avant -garde Japanese documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s could be viewed.

After this "apprenticeship at the base" in the innovative and mentally independent part of Japan, Hito Steyerl 1990/1991 worked in the Wim Wenders team as a director and technical coordinator for the film "Until the End of the World" . The filming was associated with half a world tour: The film was created in Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Portugal and the USA.

From 1992 to 1998, Hito Steyerl then studied documentary film at the University of Television and Film Munich (again), including film historian Helmut Färber, former editor of the magazine Film criticism and author of the book "Archit and Film - From the History of Seeing" (see ZEIT.de ). Harun Farocki, worked Film Critics magazine in Munich from 1974 to 1984 now came to the Wenders' experiences

In 2003, Hito Steyerl received his doctorate with a philosophical work at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and, in addition to her artistic work, soon looked for teachers. First at the Center for Cultural Studies of the Goldsmith (college for visual arts at the University of London), as a visiting professor of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

Hito Steyerl has been teaching as a professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin ; Here is the official access to Prof. Dr. phil. Hito Steyerl .

Public presence of the works by Hito Steyerl

At the University of the Arts Berlin, Hito Steyerl works as a professor of experimental film and video (Lensbased Class). Research Center for Proxy Politics at the University of the Arts in Berlin ( rcpp.lensbased.net ) together with the cultural scientist Vera Tollmann and the artist, author, author, curator Boaz Levin

Hito Steyerl has shown works on Documenta (12) , the Biennale in Venice (2015) , the sculpture projects in Münster (2017); Her provocative art was seen Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and in the Museum of Modern Art New York Your exhibition history is long and colorful and international.

Your films are shown worldwide at numerous film festivals; Art, text art and lectures are also widespread on social media.

The media art world of Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl works on the borders of art and film and on the borders of theory and practice - although border is both the interface, into each other in the subject areas, as well as the absolute limitation, especially that of the mind.

The filmmaker and author deals with (new) media, technology and the spread of pictures, she questions post -colonial criticism and feminist logic and much more, which should be urgently questioned. In texts, performances, essayist documentaries; as active and commentator, critic and teacher.

Hito Steyerl starts pretty much wherever it hurts, and often develops a background humor that forces the viewer to laugh at everything.

In the beginning there were short and medium -length documentaries such as "Germany and the I" from 1994, "Land of Smile" in 1996, "Babenhausen" 1997, racism, anti -Semitism and neo -Nazism in reunified Germany; Back then.

The first long essay film "Die emper Mitte" from 1998 represented Potsdamer Platz in the middle of the capital in the historical and current conflict: center of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi capital, suspected border territory in the Cold War, controversial "urban restructuring" after reunification, signs of global shift in power; Comrade archeology in front of the largely completed “center of modernity”.

The episode film Normality 1-10 documents (anti -Semitic) violent acts in the prosecutor and Austria committed between 1999 and 2001; Against silence acceptance and again much more timely than the addressed "normal citizen".

In 2006/07, Steyerl went in the video installation “Lovely Andrea” in search of old Bondage photos in Tokyo (from her, in 1987 during a model job during the course of study) and finds the “pornographization of politics” ; The work was shown on Documenta 12.

Here is one of the newer work: "How not to be seen: a fucking didactic educational .mov file" , to get in the mood for your own work with the artist's filmed essays:

Hito Steyerl: future and goals

With her work, Hito Steyerl wants to undermine the "Power and Supervision in A Networked Age" and the "Artificial Stupidity" (Spott name for artificial intelligence , for which no one has undergone a German translation). With the still gratifyingly subversive art capital Berlin, she chose the right place to the base in order to make her suggestions work.

The Academy of the Arts also finds this and honors Hito Steyerl with the Käthe-Kollwitz Prize 2019 -because like no other international artist, she succeeds in "bundling physical, visual and intellectual information in one work" .

After Akademie jury one of the best current answers to the question: "Where is the new form for the new content of the past few years?" , the Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary on November 6, 1919.

The species Angle Podcast: Hito Steyerl about why the metaverse has already failed

In view of the diverse political, climatic and technological crises that develop only two months after the beginning of 2023, one wonders whether this ominous future, which our species fears is much closer than we expected. It is a tense and dramatic time, which also underlines the importance of the cultural figure Hito Steyerl.

The bold works of art by the German filmmaker examine emerging technologies and media, and she often locates these studies in society and politics, globalization and capitalism. However, despite the complexity of the topic and its research -intensive process, Steyerl's work is quite captivating and often manifest themselves as highly ambitious, immersive architectural environments.

No wonder that your work has reached a global stage. Last year, her biggest retrospective entitled "I Will Survive" ended her European tour at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. And only last month her exhibition entitled "This is the Future" opened in Portland Art Museum, where it can be seen until mid -June.

As a result of this week, the European editor Kate Brown spoke to Steyerl to answer some of the questions what artificial intelligence, meta persons , crypto and an increasingly endangered natural world could mean for us.