Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl (born 1966 in Munich, Germany) is a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her prolific filmmaking and writing occupies a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have increasingly addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals, often online. She studied Documentary Film Directing at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image and at the HFF – University of Television and Film in Munich. She subsequently studied Philosophy at the Academy of the Arts in Vienna, where she received her doctorate. She is Professor for Experimental Film and Video at the UdK – University of the Arts, Berlin, where she founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
The Tower
2015,
Three-channel video installation
The title of Hito Steyerl’s The Tower refers to a characteristically hubristic project by Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein, namely to »rebuild« the mythic Tower of Babel. The project, never realized, lives on in an aptly named video game, Skyscraper Stairway to Chaos. One of the game’s Ukrainian developers is also the narrator of the film and recounts the story of the Kharkiv-based firm, staffed by laid- off engineers made redundant by the end of Cold War, who began working on the visualization of luxury developments and digital models to secure these properties. The kind of hyper-security visualized contrasts with the staff’s fragile economic and physical security. The offices are, the voiceover notes, less than an hour by tank from the Russian border. With its images of ominously empty luxury properties and bedraggled battlefield tents, The Tower captures the brittle social dynamics of the twenty-first century. In the years since the work was made, the world has added many new volumes to its encyclopedia of anxiety; instead of feeling quaint or even naive, The Tower seems as bleakly prescient as the ancient story from which its title derives.
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer