Hito Steyerl, This is the Future
2019, Video installation, environment: This is the Future, 2019, single channel HD video, color, sound, Duration: 16 min, Courtesy the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020, Film still © Hito Steyerl
BONUS TRACKS
This issue of K+ offers you additional material to learn more about the work of Hito Steyerl. Here, you will find texts, video clips, and a podcast about the exhibition, and you can also virtually enter Steyerl’s work “Leonardo’s Submarine”.
The artist, filmmaker, and author Hito Steyerl is currently one of the central positions when it comes to reflecting on the social roles of art and museums, experimenting with media forms of presentation, and critically examining the use of artificial intelligence.
Hito Steyerl was born in Munich in 1966, studied at the HFF – University of Television and Film Munich, and received her doctorate in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2003. She is Professor for Experimental Film and Video at the University of the Arts in Berlin and has published numerous texts. For twenty years, her works have been exhibited in the art context and have received international attention.
She became known to a wider audience with the work “Lovely Andrea” at documenta 12 in Kassel (2007). With “Factory of the Sun”, she was represented in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2016, she took part in the São Paolo Biennale with “Hell Yeah We Fuck Die”, and in 2017 in Skulptur Projekte Münster. In 2019, she was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Berlin Academy of Arts. That same year, her work “This Is the Future” was part of a group exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
Steyerl’s early works exemplify the 'documentary turn,' a different conception of the documentary, the conceptual change of which she decisively contributed to, formulated, and practiced. In her works from the last thirty years, the artist has followed the mutations of camera images, from the analog image and its manifold montages to the divided, fluid digital image, and has written numerous essays, lectures, and texts that reflect these major media, social, and political upheavals.