Hito Steyerl
20 May – 15 August 2010
Henie Onstad Art Centre
1311 Høvikodden
Norway
www.hok.no
Film as essayistic collage is central to Steyerl’s works. She combines own recordings with scenes from Hollywood movies and documentary material in various works, operating within different rhythms and time intervals. Her films criticize an understanding of the documentary image as a bearer of history and authenticity and as an object of empathy and identification. In a time where imagery travels, is being reinterpreted, used and distributed more quickly than ever before, the image as document has lost its apparent authority as a witness.
Simultaneously the documentation and communication of moments and situations has become common activity due to advances in technology. The image has itself become a restless and transitory object, ready for downloading, ripping, copying and recycling. Steyerl’s works are based on experimenting with the documentary as form within specific geographical, political and thematic limitations. She turns the instability of the images into an advantage and makes reinterpretable objects of them, thus discussing the political dimension of the image in our surroundings. Steyerl does not hide the director’s presence, she frequently stages herself in her films as an object among objects.
Steyerl also works with the historical avant-garde as a starting point, reformulating it to create new works, something which responds to the Art Centre’s focus on the traditions of modernism and the avant-garde, but also with our exhibitions of contemporary art that have mostly revolved around the relationship between realism and fiction, between reality and the function of the institutional framework. The experimental film and the documentary’s move into the art institution also challenge the art institution as such to discuss its own practices of exhibition.
The Exhibition consists of several of her earlier works such as The Empty Centre (1998), November (2004), Journal No1 (2007) and Lovely Andrea (2007) in addition to a new video installation, After the Crash 2 (2010) and a new edition of the video installation Red Alert (2007).
An English catalogue with an introduction by Tone Hansen and texts by Pblo Lafuente, Hito Steyerl and Maria Muhle is made for the exhtibition. The catalogue is distributed by Torpedo Press.
Hito Steyerl`s works have been exhibited at Documenta 12, Manifesta 5, International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Shanghai Biennale are some examples. A large presentation of her works opened in Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, 2009, followed by a substantial retrospective catalogue. Steyerl also writes for a number of magazines and websites and she recently published the book Die Farbe der Wahrheit.
Opening hours:
Tue – Fri: 11 – 19
Sat – Sun: 11 – 17
