Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl (born 1 January 1966) is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin. Life and career. Steyerl was born on 1 January 1966 in Munich and attended the Japan Institute of  the Moving Image. She later studied at the University of Television and Film Munich. Steyerl was deeply influenced by Harun Farocki, although she has cited her former professor, the noted film historian Helmut Färber, as having a more direct influence on her work. In 2004 she participated in Manifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. She has also participated in the 2008 Shanghai Biennale and the 2010 Gwangju and Taipei biennials. In 2007, her film "Lovely Andrea" was exhibited as a part of documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. In 2013 her work was included in the Venice Biennale and  the Istanbul Biennial. In 2015, her work was included in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2019, it was featured in the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale. Hito Steyerl’s work pushes the boundary of traditional video, often obscuring what is real beneath many layers of metaphors and satirical humor. She referred to her piece, "Red Alert", as "the outer limit of video". "Red Alert" consists of three monitors playing a video of pure red, and was commissioned to be a static representation of Steyerl's film "Lovely Andrea". The color red was chosen for its connotations to  terror alerts and red-light districts, referencing the themes of military violence and pornographic exploitation present in "Lovely Andrea". Her work concerns topics of militarization, surveillance migration, the role of media in globalization, and the dissemination of images and the culture surrounding it. Steyerl has pushed both the role and the label of fine artist, which is demonstrated through her tendencies and interests in engaging the presentational context of art. Her work is developed from research, interviews, and the collection of found images, culminating in pedagogically-oriented work in the realm of forensic documentaries and dream-like montages. In 2017 , Steyerl was listed as the number one most influential person in the contemporary art world. In recent years, Steyerl's work has expanded to confront the status of images in an increasingly digital world, institutions (including museums), networks, and labor. Her work has addressed the topic of corporate sponsorship by engaging with institutions, including "Drill" in 2019 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, for which Steyerl revealed histories connecting the building hosting the exhibition with the founding of the National Rifle Association. On the topic of private funding, Steyerl has expressed: 'Ultimately, it will be important to move  beyond protests against individuals and try to frame the problems more generally in terms of a new charter for the art world: a set of principles that include different aspects, like pay, sponsorship, governance, transparency standards, representation, sustainability, and so on, like a new deal for museums.' Steyerl employs increasingly complex approaches to pixelation within the digital sphere, editing, digital graphics, and video installation architecture. Solo exhibitions. Steyerl has had numerous solo exhibitions, including: Videos. Section::::"How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File". In 2013 Steyerl released her video "How Not to Be Seen", presenting five lessons  in invisibility. These lessons include how to 1. Make something invisible for a camera, 2. Be invisible in plain sight, 3. Become invisible by becoming a picture, 4. Be invisible by disappearing, and 5. Become invisible by merging into a world made of pictures. Many of these methods may seem impossible. "How Not to Be Seen" is a satirical take on instructional films. Much of the video also deals with surveillance and digital imagery: for example, figures in all black dance around as "pixels," and aerial photography features frequently. Thus, "How Not to be Seen" becomes a tutorial for invisibility  in an age of intense hypersurveillance. Section::::"Liquidity, Inc.". "Liquidity, Inc.," (from 2014) consists of a video and a seating/backdrop installation. The video includes interviews with Jason Wood, a financial-advisor-turned-MMA-fighter, mesmerizing clips of ocean waves, and mock-weather reports from characters in balaclavas. As these visuals swirl around, a metaphor forms between water and images/money/trend in the digital age. Section::::"Factory of the Sun". "Factory of the Sun," like "Liquidity, Inc." deals with finance. In this video, which debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennial, clip art people swarm and create "artificial sunshine" for a bank . The video utilizes light, sunshine, and warmth as motifs as it explores surveillance and mega-finance. Awards. In 2010 Steyerl was awarded with the NEW:VISION Award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival for her film "In Free Fall". In 2015 Steyerl won the inaugural EYE Prize, a collaboration between EYE Film Institute Netherlands and the Paddy & Joan Leigh Fermor Arts Fund. The aim of the award is to support and promote an artist or filmmaker who have made outstanding contributions to their field. Select writings. Steyerl is a frequent contributor to online art journals such as E-flux. She  has also written: