Art Metropole

#09675

Hito Steyerl

Artist

Hito Steyerl

Date

2010

Publisher

Torpedo Press

Format

Artists' Books

Details

Softcover

ISBN

978-82-90955-89-7

Size

15 × 24 × 0.5 cm

Length

93 

Description

Film as essayistic collage is central to Steyerl’s works. She combines own recordings with scenes from Hollywood movies and documentary material in various works, operating within different rhythms and time intervals. Her films criticize an understanding of the documentary image as a bearer of history and authenticity and as an object of empathy and identification. In a time where imagery travels, is being reinterpreted, used and distributed more quickly than ever before, the image as document has lost its apparent authority as a witness. Simultaneously the documentation and communication of moments and situations has become common activity due to advances in technology. The image has itself become a restless and transitory object, ready for downloading, ripping, copying and recycling. Steyerl’s works are based on experimenting with the documentary as form within specific geographical, political and thematic limitations. She turns the instability of the images into an advantage and makes reinterpretable objects of them, thus discussing the political dimension of the image in our surroundings. Steyerl does not hide the director’s presence, she frequently stages herself in her films as an object among objects.

The catalogue experiment with the catalogue essay as form. The texts are more or less linked to each other, the authors were asked to relate to the previous text; forming a chain reaction.

The first text is by Pablo Lafuente: “Two Ways to Read Film (and its Politics): Hito Steyerl, Sigmund Freud and Aristotle”.

The second text is Steyerl’s reaction to Lafuente’s text, a manifesto “A Thing Like You and Me”. Here all heroes are done away with and the emancipatory desire to become a subject is pushed aside to favour the embracing of the object.

The third is by Maria Muhle, who relates back to the two previous texts with her “Notes on Documentary Realism”. Muhle looks at the historical realism seen from a literary and art historical perspective.

IICD

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