Movies: Hito Steyerl

The last film in Vidokle's trilogy on Cosmism is a meditation on the museum as the site of resurrection-a central idea for many Cosmist thinkers, scientists and avant-garde artists. Filmed at the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Zoological Museum,...

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) mocks an instructional film on the idea of becoming invisible in the digital world....

The space of the junkyard allows various ‘crash’ narratives to unfold, with the stories of actual crashes and the remnants and afterlife of these machines becoming metaphors for economic decline. This is an investigation of planes as they are parked ...

In 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, Film Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo. Fifty years later, after the collapse of the Communist bloc, this newsreel was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. In Journal No. ...

Based on the ideas of Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov, Anton Vidokle’s film was shot in Siberia, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. Fedorov, like others, believed that death was a mistake, “because the energy of cosmos is indestructible, because true relig...

In the eighties, Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar...

The second installment of Anton Vidokle’s trilogy on Russian cosmism, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, looks at the poetic dimension of the solar cosmology of Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky. Shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevs...

If all pictures became current, in that they pass by and in doing so, are connectable with one another, whether elegantly or obscenely, through translation or association—how would it be possible to fasten down a picture? Hito Steyerl’s light-hearted...

The story of the good citizen and postworker Bernhardt Stachoviak, who ends up running amok. Others would say: Out of his immense hatred towards mankind. He would say: Against his own will....

Steyerl’s film traces the impact of an influx of transnational companies on the city dwellers of Berlin in post-reunification Germany. The effect of the changing economy and politics on the city and its inhabitants is echoed through their physical re...

What is declared normal by some and accepted as such by the majority sometimes represents a concrete threat to others. Normality 1-10, a series of short video essays, registers everyday neo-fascist violence as being an instrument of such "normalizat...

Abstract (2012) is a return to the contested narrative of Andrea Wolf’s death, with Steyerl traveling to Kurdistan in search of information about her friend's murder. The work links cinematic shooting and military warfare together, implicating German...

An oral history of Artists Space, the legendary New York artists organization. Told through the voices of the artists, critics and curators who formed it, the film is narrated by voiceover culled from 30 hours of archival cassette tape interviews ove...

Using video, sculpture and archival material, the work gives form to a dramatic event that took place in 1993 during the war in Bosnia, when a paramilitary unit abducted 20 people from a train. Hito Steyerl has made her mark on the international art...

It begins with a blank screen. The word ‘STRIKE’ appears across it, in white capital letters against a black background. Then a woman appears, dressed in black. She approaches an empty LCD monitor and strikes its undifferentiated surface once with a ...

A three-channel video that begins with the animation of a fragmented sentence: HELL YEAH WE FUCK DIE—which, according to Billboard magazine, are the most frequently used five words in the English language music charts of the past decade. They provide...

Steyerl’s immersive installation focuses on the making of the video game "Skyscraper: Stairway to Chaos" by the Ukrainian company Ace3D, based on Saddam Hussein’s unrealised plans to reconstruct the Tower of Babel in Babylon, the ancient capital that...

A short documentary about the Universal Embassy. After the collapse of the Somali government twenty years ago, its embassy in Brussels was left empty. The embassy and the sovereignty of the grounds were claimed by a group of activists who planted the...

The German artist Hito Steyerl has used her work in the Venice Biennale to call out one of the world’s biggest weapons companies for appropriating Leonardo da Vinci’s name....

During the corona-related shutdown in November 2020, Hito Steyerl’s exhibition I Will Survive at K21 (September 26, 2020—January 10, 2021) transforms into a livestream format. The project “4 Nights at the Museum,” developed by the artist, filmmaker, ...