Hito Steyerl — À propos — Slash Paris

Entirely turned towards new technologies and their influence on our societies, the work of Hito Steyerl explores, through installations, videos compiling various archives and images gleaned from edifying montages, the manifestations of the influence of new technologies on our representation of the world and, therefore, our way of living in it. Born in 1966 in Munich, she studied in Japan before continuing her course on moving images in Munich and then completed a thesis in philosophy.

Imbued with the ideas of the Frankfurt School and in particular the conception of art as a way of generating a critical perspective on the present, Steyerl plays with the extravagance and excess of her subjects (3D representations of robots with checkered features, cartoonish animated characters, stylized youthful visual communication typefaces) to provide strong and stylized experiences of our own vulnerabilities. His documentary essays, which today constitute formal inventions which are authoritative and marry the research of a number of thinkers, apply themselves to thinking about models of reflection devoid of forms of traditional hierarchy.

Committed, polymorphous and definitively free, the work of Hito Steyerl imposes itself as a mirror as playful as it is serious of the erosion of links or, at the very least, of the digging of new borders precisely coming to contradict the promises, even the very meaning of all the new communication routes.

Guillaume Benoit for Slash-Paris