HITO STEYERL.

In this lecture-performance, Hito Steyerl lays out fragments of texts, ideas and images to consider contemporary visual blindness and contemporary war. She offers forceful address on issues ranging from Freeport storage units to Artificial Intelligence. Her research focuses on media, technology and the distribution of images.
 
In her texts, performances and essayist documentary films, Hito Steyerl deals with postcolonial criticism and feminist criticism of representational logic. Her work is fuelled by her critical examination of the production, use, and circulation of images from the mid-twentieth century into the Information Age. Through her research into conflict, commerce, and the tangled connections between them, Steyerl helps set the agenda for current art world discourse.
 
She has addressed the wide-ranging effects of today’s mass proliferation and dissemination of images, issues of surveillance and militarization, and the evolving functions of technology in our networked culture.
 
Steyerl’s works comment on the constant search for speed and efficiency that governs contemporary life practices, revealing a sense of reality that is absurd, articulated by the tension created in the confrontation between images and texts. She wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.
 
Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.
 
Her films and lectures increasingly address the presentational context of art. Her works remind us that in an era in which phone cameras and surveillance are everywhere, we can always be seen by a lens. She sees the germ of post-capitalism in the internet’s networked infrastructure.