Hito Steyerl (b. 1966 ) Berlin-based artist , one of the most critically acclaimed artists working in the field of video today. She completed her film studies in Munich and Tokyo, and earned her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Steyerl’s work focuses on contemporary issues such as feminism and militarisation, as well as the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies. She has participated in a number of leading exhibitions, such as Documenta, Manifesta, as well as biennials in Venice, Taipei, Istanbul and Gwangju.
About Curation
“My conviction is that, now more than ever, real life is much stranger than any fiction one could imagine. So somehow the forms of reporting have to become crazier and stranger, too. Otherwise they are not going to be ‘documentary’ enough; they are not going to live up to what’s happening.”
–Hito Steyerl in conversation with Laura Poitras, in the May 2015 issues of Artforum.
We live in odd times. And this oddity is made exponentially more perceivable and accessible by the barrage of new techniques available to observe our reality. The rhetoric used to be that oversaturation numbs, but late capitalism has evolved with such velocity and intensity that original sensibilities have not only emerged but erupted within this space, often to the willing negligence of the novelty-obsessed art world. When visual art is submitted to “viral spreading” and “language to the fake regime of advertising” (Franco Berardi), and as wechat-commerce lingo translates into real profit and solidifies into style, our ways of critical thinking and cultural production will just have to evolve along.
If the inaugural “THE BANK SHOW: Vive le Capital” marked an effort to come to terms with the fact that contemporary art is—and can only be, for a while—embedded and operative in a world calibrated by global capital, its sequel focuses on a single artist whose singular approach to navigating the unstable grounds of contemporary life “in the neoliberal thick of things” feels more relevant than ever, perhaps eerily so. When Liquidity Inc., the main attraction in this exhibition, first came out in 2014, the fate of its protagonist Jacob Wood—an adopted Vietnam War orphan turned Lehman Brothers financier turned MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter after losing his job in the 2008 economic crisis—already felt like an all too familiar narrative with the last global financial fiasco securely tucked into the past. Yet now as you sit on the Hokusai-inspired ramp specially constructed to experience this video, 1.93 million Euros had just been raised on a crowd-funding platform that ultimately failed to resuscitate the Greek economy and, together with China’s stock market downfall, one can only forecast continued instability for the global economy and the world that it sustains.
Even though Liquidity Inc.’s main arc revolves around two of the most volatile global forces—the financial market and the climate—and how they shape the circumstances of individual lives, it also uninhibitedly explores the expanded connections among abstract ideas, historical events (Jacob’s Vietnam War origins and the radical, anti-war group The Weather Underground), and geopolitical dynamics with the nimbleness and comic relief that are the hallmarks of our post-internet, heavily imaged culture. The essence of liquidity is to adapt. As Bruce Lee preaches at the beginning of the video :“Be like water, my friend” whether in fighting, in portfolio management, or, it would seem, in making sense of contemporary reality. As many art practitioners tread cautiously by burdening still objects with too many references or interrogating a limited scope of topics with serious, established methodology, Hito Steyerl has reveled in and improvised on the erratically morphing language of hyper-reality.
In conjunction with the two works on view--Liquidity Inc. and STRIKE, a 2010 work that harks back to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 feature about a workers’ strike at the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution with piercing concision and potent whimsy, an integral component to THE BANK SHOW sequel is a small selection of the artist’s own theoretical (but wildly entertaining) texts which have been translated into Chinese for the first time through a collaboration with The Hunting (GU Qianfan, ZHANG Hanlu, and LIU Qianxi) and artforum.cn. This edition includes Steyerl’s seminal essays In Defense of the Poor Image (2009), Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy (2010), The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation (2012), as well as a very recent conversation with Laura Poitras, journalist and director of the Academy Award-winning documentary Citizenfour. In this mind-bending exchange, Steyerl observes that Poitras’ film, which captured Edward Snowden amid his exposé of the NSA spying scandal as it unfolded, seems to “lie in the way all of you came together and then created the event, the story, and many of the tools to tell it while all hell was breaking loose around you.” Yet this “lie” seems to be the only way that we can navigate reality today, by creating and post-editing its narrative in real time.
How do we critically engage with events and circumstances of certain magnitude without the necessary historical distance? Hito Steyerl’s writings have already opened up some possibilities for fellow artists and art writers. While she predicted that alien intelligence will most likely understand our civilization through spam, due to its crushing dominance over our more refined attributes, her projections are firmly grounded in andtelling of our immediate reality, where “the dream team of hyper-capitalism” consists of men and women “on knock off antidepressants, fitted with enhanced body parts.” Too often the art world finds itself in desperate need of utopia, after life, or alternative futures (preferably free of the plight of capitalism), like some kind of ideological cleanse-juice, without realizing its impotence in producing interesting enough works about the present day. “How can people get away with being so boring?” Steyerl asks, reminding us that even in a world where our actions are only meaningful when imaged and our presence visible by coerced participation in capitalism, there remains vast, uncharted territories that hold promises for a new discourse in art and politics.
Text / Xin Wang
