HITO STEYERL
In her work, Hito Steyerl (Germany) constantly interrelates between the personal and the political, establishing connections between art and fiction, on the one hand, and society and reality on the other. Her work is often based on events or people from her own past, constructed from retained visual materials and addressing the issue of how these images relate to the personal recollection and the generally prevailing ideas in our society.
At the last Documenta in Kassel, Hito Steyerl exhibited two works: Lovely Andrea and Journal No. 1. In Lovely Andrea, Steyerl starts a search after a photograph for which she posed as a bondage model in the so-called ‘nawa-shibari’ style in 1987. This often comic quest takes her to all kinds of archives and photographers’ studios. With a quick style of editing she combines her own footage with scenes from, for instance, Spiderman movies and 80s pop music. Journal No. 1 also is a search, but in this case featuring images from a more distant past: the first newsreel made after World War II in Sarajevo. During the Balkan War this newsreel got lost. Steyerl tries to reconstruct this newsreel by means of witnesses and drawings, thereby questioning the differences between reality and recollection, and fact and propaganda.
In this program, Steyerl will screen both films and discuss their creation.
Hito Steyerl will be intervie wed by Rosi Braidotti (Faculty Professor of Arts & Humanities at Utrecht University).
Lovely Andrea, Hito Steyerl (Germany 2007, 30.15 min)
Journal No. 1, Hito Steyerl (Germany 2007, 23:00 min)