About the exhibition

What is a garden, a habitat, a sphere, a cave? Which spirits live there and how do they show themselves? In a direct dialogue with the Kunsthaus Graz, renowned German artist and essayistic documentary filmmaker Hito Steyerl is creating an installation in the dark dome of Space01 that grows and interlocks on digital as well as analogue levels.
 

What will grow in glass spheres and on shiny screens under the large bubble of the Kunsthaus requires care in both digital and physical space. Within Steyerl’s living setting, structures that have long been closely intertwined in everyday life become an astonishing accumulation of a larger whole, nourishing and consuming each other.
In a maelstrom of pulsating images, digital rhythms, and sounds, Steyerl has the audience speculate on the relations between language and aesthetic form, between technological structures, biological life, and power-preserving systems.

Hito Steyerl’s works are factual, informed and aesthetically polished, sometimes humorous and (therefore) irritating analyses of our high-tech society. As a profound expert on digital space, against the backdrop of the climate crisis, the pandemic, the digital revolution, neoliberalism and the associated shift in the meanings of work, power, control and distribution she develops multiple, partially interactive narratives that identify the image as a site where the world is perceived. The artist thereby follows “reality expanded by technology,” engaging both critically and subversively with ecological systems and their ties to global flows of capital and goods, to migration and the question of participation in existing power structures.
Playing with the manipulative power of the visual, she thereby deals out institutional critique that extends far beyond the museum.

Hito Steyerl was born in Munich in 1966, and lives and works in Berlin. Steyerl is one of the most important media artists and profound analysts of a digital, image-driven world. She studied

documentary film directing at the Japan Institute of Moving Image and later at the University of Film and Television in Munich. She went on to study philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she completed her doctorate. She is Professor of Experimental Film and Video at the Berlin University of the Arts and co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics there. For the past 20 years, her work has been exhibited in art contexts and widely received internationally.

In addition to her work as a film artist, Steyerl is also an author and performer. Together with Mark Waschke, she staged the play Ich spiele, also bin ich! Ein digitaler Bauernkrieg. A selection of her essays is collected in four books: Die Farbe der Wahrheit (2008), The Wretched of the Screen (2012), Beyond Representation / Jenseits der Repräsentation (2016), Duty Free Art – Art in the Age of Planetary Civil Wars / Kunst im Zeitalter des globalen Bürgerkriegs (2017/2018).

Images

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