Hito Steyerl

Digital Times, Feudal Times

Film and Video

Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall, film, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and the Andrew Kreps Gallery — Hito Steyerl, *In Free Fall*, film, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and the Andrew Kreps Gallery

Held on 23, 23, 24, 29 nov 2024

Almost ten years on from the exhibition Hito Steyerl. Duty-Free Art, this audiovisual series offers a chance to taker a deeper look at the work of Hito Steyerl, a pivotal figure in contemporary critical thought around images, technology and power. Organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Márgenes, an international film festival in Madrid which explores new audiovisual idioms, the series features a master lecture by Steyerl and a selection of her films, stretching from her early documentary essays to her most recent output.

Flecked with humour, irony and intelligence, Steyerl’s work activates a critique of digital capitalism, exploring the transformation of images in the post-truth era: how their proliferation in global networks obscures the distinction between reality and fiction, determines a new geopolitical order and blurs the limits of our intimacy. Steyerl has formulated a genre of her own combining critical theory, contemporary art and documentary film, visually blending in with the low-res aesthetic of Network images — “poor images”, as she puts it — which freely circulate with no hierarchy and regardless of quality. This aesthetic is related to a critique of art’s value in the market economy and the visual preciosity of film as a new form of academicism.

In this series, the film-making of Steyerl elaborates on a central theme in the present time: the right to anonymity and the search for invisibility; how not to be seen in the age of total surveillance as a form of resistance under the absolute control of State, corporations and people. It also addresses other issues such as the precarity of the culture worker in the digital age, the impact of wars and militarisation on new image types and the power of artificial intelligence in our lives.

Curator

Chema González

Collaboration

Goethe-Institut

Organised by

Museo Reina Sofía and Márgenes. The Madrid International Film Festival

Participants

Hito Steyerl is a German film-maker and theorist. Her work is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection and the MoMA, Centre Pompidou and Tate collections, and she has also participated in documenta Kassel and the Venice Biennale and Istanbul Biennial. She is the author of The Wretched of the Screen (Sternberg Press, 2012) and Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (Verso Books, 2017).

Programme

Saturday, 23 November 2024 - 12pm

Session 1

Hito Steyerl. Abstract
Germany, 2012, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 7’ 30’’
— With a master lecture by Hito Steyerl after the screening (in English with simultaneous interpreting)
Abstract marks Steyerl’s transition from documentary language to the contemporary grammar of the image: a video-dialogue between two screens with images and texts based on the film technique of shot and counter-shot, where the violence of war and the artist’s own history are interwoven. In one of the screens, she revisits the place in which her friend Andrea Wolf, a member of the Kurdish resistance, was shot dead in 1998 by the Turkish Army. In the other, she films the offices of Lockheed Martin, an arms manufacturer and dealer in the war that killed her friend.
Saturday, 23 November 2024 - 6pm

Session 2

Hito Steyerl. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File
Germany, 2013, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 15’ 52’’
Hito Steyerl. Liquidity Inc.
Germany, 2014, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 30’ 15’’
— With a presentation by Hito Steyerl (in English with simultaneous interpreting)
In How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File drawings of military calibration satellites in the California desert preface a parody on how not to be seen in the age of global surveillance. Liquidity Inc., meanwhile, is a razor-sharp film on the economic crisis, martial arts, financial trading, information flows and bioclimatic systems. These are two of Steyerl’s most inventive and comical films, and also clear-eyed reflections on the economy of speculation, financial abstraction and global surveillance.
Sunday, 24 November 2024 - 12pm

Session 3

Hito Steyerl. SocialSim
Germany, 2020, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 18’ 19’’
Hito Steyerl. Factory of the Sun
Germany, 2015, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 23’
Hito Steyerl. In Free Fall
Germany, 2010, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 33’ 43’’
In SocialSim, a delirious exploration of the immersive aesthetic and worlds created by artificial intelligence, Steyerl transports the viewer to a space inhabited by police and workers as 3D avatars, activated in a choreography programmed from data on police violence. Factory of the Sun, meanwhile, is an exercise in speculation through science fiction: humans live trapped in a future where body and time is monetised as a new form of control and survival. The film thus reflects on digital labour exploitation via a hacker who attempts to escape this oppressive environment. Finally, In Free Fall charts the cycle of destruction, re-use and recycling in the history of a Boeing 707 to reflect on a capitalism in which everything is consumed, transformed and re-sold.
Friday, 29 November 2024 - 7pm

Session 4

Hito Steyerl. November
Germany, 2004, colour and black and white, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 25’ 19’’
Hito Steyerl. Lovely Andrea
Germany and Japan, 2007, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, 30’
The series concludes with two medium-length films stretching back to Steyerl’s documentary-making origins. November is a reflection on the decline of revolution by way of the friendship between the artist and Andrea Wolf — her childhood friend who became a Kurdish guerrilla and was murdered by the Turkish Army in 1998 — and combines amateur film, archive material and fragments from a martial arts film they both shot. In Lovely Andrea Steyerl travels to Tokyo in search of an erotic bondage photograph she posed for when she was a student to set forth a reflection on how the female body is represented and controlled in contemporary society.

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This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.

Submitting Proposals

The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:

An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.

A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.

CV and contact details.

Only one proposal per person will be accepted.

Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.

Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.

For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.

The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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