Hito Steyerl – A brief portrait

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

In 2017, Steyerl was ranked at the top of the “Power100” list by the British art magazine ArtReview . While this was an honor for Hito Steyerl, it also immediately clarifies that this list of “most influential people in the contemporary art world” is not primarily about art: Hito Steyerl is one of the few active artists to have achieved a top position on this list.

Before her, only Damien Hirst (2005 and 2008) and Ai Weiwei (2011) had achieved this, because the "kings" of international mega-galleries, mega-museums, and mega-art spectacles share the top spots in a kind of game of musical chairs. With these top rankings, ArtReview has made it clear since 2002 that its ranking is closer to the stock market than to art itself.

In 2016/2017, art enthusiasts in the art world were already groaning bitterly about its commercial decay; and the whole world was seething under the weight of other would-be kings… so the editors of ArtReview almost became Robin Hoods of art when, in 2017, they placed an artist at its helm who “sees virtual reality platforms as a training program to adapt people to a world in which they are increasingly absent” and who “operates in the natural mode of a (social) attack dog, skillfully striking from the periphery.”

ArtReview's idea of ​​placing a woman at the top of the ranking in 2017 was almost prophetic: The hashtag #MeToo (which not only revealed the current extent of sexual harassment but also emphatically made it clear that equality is a foreign concept in the world of "power people") only entered the scene in mid-October 2017…

ArtReview's Robin Hood-like approach is exposed as soon as the reader learns from other sources that Hito Steyerl is the first woman to lead the ranking since 2002; after this slip-up, David Zwirner, "The head of an expanding New York, London and Hong Kong gallery empire," once again at the top in 2018.

The world's best art list , which focuses primarily on art itself , is published by artfacts.net. It also focuses more on equality ( ArtFacts.Net GmbH was founded and is managed by Marek Claassen and Stine Albertsen), and even more on democracy: While the ArtFacts ranking measures an artist's position based on their exhibition history, it's important to note that the fantastic works created in quiet, private studios are often poorly represented.

However, this exhibition presence is evaluated by a complex algorithm, which has been told that it is allowed to award a few more points to the MoMA exhibition than to the exhibition in the rural art association.

Artfacts thus countered the new distrust of the old media early on: Towards the end of the reign of the “unruly and uncontrollable masters”, many readers/art lovers consider it quite possible that critics deliberately want to boost certain artists through high rankings; for reasons of speculation, boasting about insider knowledge or other reasons related to wounded vanity.

This danger is averted by the application of an algorithm; the collective knowledge of all critics still flows in through their participation in exhibition preparation, etc. ... the algorithm certainly cannot solve the further problem of a “false market worship” of art, but within the given situation, this ranking does a lot for the credibility of art evaluation.

On this list, Hito Steyerl as artist number 118 (in the world!) , and her chart has shown an upward trend for years. That's enough, and Hito Steyerl probably doesn't care much about rankings anyway (except that they encourage more people to engage with her not-so-simple art). Because Hito Steyerl doesn't create art for the masses, but rather intellectual art of the highest order; her artworks and texts are astute analyses of current socio-political conditions.

How did Hito Steyerl get into art?

Hito Steyerl was born in Munich in 1966 and in her youth was exposed to much of the “New German Cinema” , which, with directors such as Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, aimed to counter the 1950s Heimatfilm, Karl May, Schlager and Edgar Wallace crime films with socially critical and political films in the spirit of the French “Nouvelle Vague” and the 1968 protest movement .

From 1987 to 1990, Steyerl studied cinematography and documentary film directing Academy of Visual Arts Imamura Shohei and Hara Kazuo . The famous and controversial New Wave director Imamura Shohei ran this unusual film school on the outskirts of Tokyo, which openly supported school dropouts.

Japanese documentary filmmaker Hara Kazuo had dropped out of university to work at a special needs school and often documented people who rebelled against the strict boundaries of decency and obedience in Japanese society. No one in the Japanese film industry had employed these directors; Imamura's school was also one of the few places where avant-garde Japanese documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s could be seen.

Following this “apprenticeship at the grassroots level” in the innovative and intellectually independent part of Japan, Hito Steyerl worked in 1990/1991 on Wim Wenders’ team as assistant director and technical coordinator for the film “Until the End of the World” . The filming involved a journey halfway around the world: the film was shot in Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Portugal and the USA.

From 1992 to 1998, Hito Steyerl studied documentary film directing (again) University of Television and Film Munich "Architecture and Film – From the History of Seeing" (see Zeit.de ). To his experiences with Wenders was added the influence of Harun Farocki, worked in Munich from 1974 to 1984 as editor and author of the journal Filmkritik

In 2003, Hito Steyerl received her doctorate in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and soon sought teaching opportunities alongside her artistic work. She initially taught at the Center for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths (the College of Fine Arts at the University of London), and later as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

Hito Steyerl has been a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts ; here is the official link to Prof. Dr. phil. Hito Steyerl .

Public presence of the works of Hito Steyerl

a professor of experimental film and video at the Berlin University of the Arts Research Center for Proxy Politics at the Berlin University of the Arts ( rcpp.lensbased.net ) with cultural studies scholar Vera Tollmann and artist, author, and curator Boaz Levin

Hito Steyerl has shown works at documenta (12) , the Venice Biennale (2015) , and the Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); her provocative art has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art New York ; her exhibition history is long, colorful, and international.

Her films are shown at numerous film festivals worldwide; her art, writing, and lectures are also widely disseminated via social media.

The media art world of Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl works at the boundaries of visual art and film, and at the boundaries of theory and practice – whereby "boundary" refers both to the interface where subject areas merge into one another, and to the absolute limitation, especially that of the mind.

The filmmaker and author engages with (new) media, technology, and the dissemination of images; she questions postcolonial critique and feminist logics of representation, and much more that urgently needs to be questioned. She does this in texts, performances, and essayistic documentaries; as a practitioner and commentator, critic and teacher.

Hito Steyerl targets pretty much everywhere where it really hurts, and often develops a subtle humor that forces the viewer to laugh despite all the horror.

Initially, there were short and medium-length documentaries such as “Germany and the Self” from 1994, “Land of Smiles” from 1996, and “Babenhausen” from 1997, which addressed racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-Nazism in reunified Germany; at the time, still in good time.

The first long essay film, “The Empty Center,” from 1998, depicted Potsdamer Platz in the center of the capital in historical and current conflict: center of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi capital, mined border territory in the Cold War, controversial “urban restructuring” after reunification, sign of global power shifts; cinematic archaeology in front of the now largely completed “center of modernity.”

The episodic film Normality 1–10 documents (anti-Semitic) acts of violence committed between 1999 and 2001 in post-reunification Germany and Austria; against the silent acceptance and, in turn, much earlier than the addressed “ordinary citizen”.

In 2006/07, Steyerl went in search of old bondage photos in Tokyo (taken by herself in 1987 during a modeling job while studying) “Lovely Andrea” “pornification of politics” ; the work was shown at documenta 12.

Here is one of her more recent works: “How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File” , to get you in the mood for engaging with the artist's filmed essays:

Hito Steyerl: Future and Goals

Hito Steyerl aims “Power and Supervision in a Networked Age” and “Artificial Stupidity” (a derogatory term for artificial intelligence , for which no one has yet bothered to find a German translation) with her work. With Berlin, still a refreshingly subversive art capital, she has chosen precisely the right place to base her ideas.

The Academy of Arts agrees and honors Hito Steyerl with the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019 – because she succeeds, like hardly any other international artist, in “bringing together physical, visual and intellectual information in a provocative and insightful way in one work” .

According to the Academy jury, this is one of the best current answers to the question: “Where is the new form for the new content of recent years?” , which Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary on November 6, 1919.

The Art Angle Podcast: Hito Steyerl on why the metaverse has already failed

In light of the multifaceted political, climatic, and technological crises unfolding just two months into 2023, one wonders whether this ominous future, so feared by our species, is much closer than we anticipated. It is a tense and dramatic time, but one that also underscores the significance of the cultural figure Hito Steyerl.

The bold artworks of the German filmmaker explore emerging technologies and media, often situating these explorations within society and politics, globalization and capitalism. Yet despite the complexity of the subject matter and her research-intensive process, Steyerl's works are undeniably captivating and often manifest as highly ambitious, immersive architectural environments.

It's no wonder her work has reached a global stage. Last year, her largest retrospective to date, titled "I Will Survive," concluded its European tour at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. And just last month, her exhibition "This is the Future" opened at the Portland Art Museum, where it will be on display until mid-June.

In this week's episode, European editor Kate Brown spoke with Steyerl to answer some of the questions about what artificial intelligence, the metaverse , crypto , and an increasingly threatened natural world could mean for us.

Joachim Rodriguez y Romero

Owner and Managing Director of Kunstplaza . Publicist, editor, and passionate blogger in the fields of art, design, and creativity since 2011. Graduated with a degree in web design from university (2008). Further developed creative techniques through courses in freehand drawing, expressive painting, and theatre/acting. Profound knowledge of the art market gained through years of journalistic research and numerous collaborations with key players and institutions in the arts and culture sector.

www.kunstplaza.de