Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl, Abstract, 2012. 5 minutes, still from HD video with sound. Photo by Leon Kahane

Press Release:

The moment an image appears on a screen, a web of political relationships is not only reflected, but actively produced. This places the forces responsible for images at the very center of an ethics of production and reception. Hito Steyerl is an artist whose essays and artworks insist that this ethics is much more than a critical tool for explaining and decoding images, but actually serves to release the image, suspending it momentarily from political or economic imperatives to become the structure, content, and departure point for artistic subjectivity.

From October 4 to December 21, 2012, e-flux is proud to present Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in the US. The exhibition will premiere two new video works, Abstract and Adorno’s Grey, and include her video essay from 2004, November.

Legend has it that Theodor W. Adorno had the auditorium where he taught at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt painted grey to aid concentration. In Adorno’s Grey, a team of conservators burrows into the wall of this auditorium hoping to reveal the layer of grey paint beneath it. A voiceover recounts an incident in 1969 when, after three female students approached and bore their breasts to him during a lecture, Adorno collected his papers and ran away in a panic. This would be his last lecture.

Abstract presents a scenario in which the violence of warfare and the violence of aesthetics twist around each other. The two-channel video visits the site where Steyerl’s friend Andrea Wolf was killed in 1998, but through a prism that refracts cinematic language against the weapons that killed her friend. As the site and circumstances of her death fold into the act of witnessing it from a distance, the ethical burden of identifying those responsible also appears to live and die with the debris that still remains at the site of the helicopter attack.

Hito Steyerl would like to thank all those involved in the production of the works and Esme Buden, Alwin Franke, e-flux, Art Institute of Chicago, Aneta Szylak, Henk Slager, Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Lisa Dorin, Massimiliano Gioni, Tracey Parker, Kevan Jenson, Ben Thorp Brown, Laura Hamann, Laura Barlow, and Josh Altman.Hito Steyerl would like to thank all those involved in the production of the works and Esme Buden, Alwin Franke, e-flux, Art Institute of Chicago, Aneta Szylak, Henk Slager, Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Lisa Dorin, Massimiliano Gioni, Tracey Parker, Kevan Jenson, Ben Thorp Brown, Laura Hamann, Laura Barlow, and Josh Altman.

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