Artist Talk: Hito Steyerl

good evening thank you all for coming tonight and joining us in celebrating the opening of hee Josh Tyrell this is the future da Joe is proud to present this comprehensive survey of the artists work from the last 15 years it is the largest time-based media exhibition we have attempted to date and the results of many months of preparation and hard work work from our extremely talented team so big thank you to every one of them particularly the project manager Christine Rowland T and the curatorial research assistant Catarina value of each I would also like to bring your attention to our special guest this evening the members of the Milky Way garden from Parkdale they're right over there for those of you who have seen the exhibition already you know that they've been hitos collaborators for the last year and the result of that process is on display upstairs as part of the work free free plots it has been an immense honor and pleasure to work with hito in preparing this exhibition and I would like to thank her for her generosity with which she has engaged in that process she has given us a wonderful exhibition that I hope you will return to see many more times for the next four months to experience the world filtered through hito sterile precise yet dispersive lens is to enter a parallel universe where familiar concepts acquire new dimensions and meanings and where our current reality it's presented in kaleidoscopic refractions every work starts from an image a character a concept or a location on to which juxtaposes various visual narrative and sonic layers equal parts humorous and frightening styrol vision of our world is often accompanied by an irresistible danceable soundtrack her work encompasses film visual arts writing and critical thoughts her practice resists simple definition any attempt to define what she does would require a completely new language one based on the investigative methodologies she uses to illuminate complex networks of associations and collaborations to discuss her work heater will be joined this evening by brian druker writer and editor of art in america as well as a contributor to the exhibition catalog please join me in welcoming the wonderful hitters Tyrell and Brian [Applause] Thanks Adelina for the introduction and for including me it feels really good to be part of such a great exhibition you know you have a reputation in the art world as a kind of prophet of the digital age and a keen observer of how media circulates and how structures of international capital and networks are changing our lives but I feel like this often obscures your work as an activist and an organizer and that's been coming to the foreground in a lot of your works lately it's a bit harder to display in a gallery setting but you have been making works with or about community organizations when I last saw you this summer you were opening your show drill at the Park Avenue Armory in New York which included a new video that included interviews with anti-gun activist in the United States and here in Toronto you're showing broken windows which was made in New Jersey and is about a group that paints over boarded up windows in order to sort of protect the neighborhood from police surveillance and so I was kind of interested in how you came to this shift and in your practice for making works that were so much about things like drones and 3d models and financial networks and we're coming to really focus on on people and community organizations okay well thank you right extensive questioned thank you everyone for being here thanks a lot Adelina Forte and Stefan for the introduction so just to come to your question I think those trends have always coexisted in my work no there always has been a very documentary maybe core to it but then also a more playful maybe even more baki you know fictional partly as a stick strand to it so both have coexisted and usually the documentary work was sort of pushed into the background very often but I think that of course also since 2016 if we want to talk about that as a as a precise date I think basically the last hopes if they were existing about the digital space being very empowering and liberating and also space for creativity have been very much disappointed right so the atmosphere especially in the digital sphere has changed a lot right and so it is I didn't stop you know making words so it works about technology also about you know I don't know artificial intelligence and so on and I still do it but I think there is a sort of sobriety that's crept into that work as well yeah and that installation here the work about the organization in New Jersey is paired with another video that's about people who are developing an artificial intelligence system that will I identify the sound of broken windows to create alerts how did you come to pair those two I mean I feel like juxtaposition and and the cut that kind of pairing of unlikely couples is is such an important aspect of your work yes I was utterly fascinated when I first read about those researchers in Cambridge who were literally breaking hundreds of windows you know regular windows of houses in order to train an artificial intelligence to recognize the sound of broken windows so that the system could probably call the police or something but you know in order to train the system to prevent you know the breaking of windows ultimately they had to break all these windows and this their job and they did it you know do you know him broke windows I thought that was fascinating also you know the sound aspect to it is very often sort of not really acknowledged in technology it's a lot about images image recognition automation and so on but not a lot about sound and that's a whole you know new field for recognition for example but just the idea that you had to basically break a lot of things to to to create some kind of cutting-edge technological process that became for me a sort of symbol of what is called creative destruction ultimately as an economical model but also as an urban model as something that really starts to impact on cities and to destroy or to hollow out or to I don't like that word I mean I didn't know the word at all it's the word blight was new to me and I was taught to avoid it right but to destroy parts of cities is one of the side effects of Technology and how do you see that relationship between creation and destruction in the that Camden Association do you see a kind of parallel there are sort of an inversion so basically the connection between both is the different relation to Windows right one group destroys the windows to make progress and the other sort of symbolically in a way repairs windows by painting them so they paint basically decal windows in order to install in front of broken windows to make the neighborhood look differently and I was thinking through this very ambivalent and interesting process of repair and that a window needs to be painted in order to be repaired I thought it was fascinating so I tried to juxtapose both of these processes to try to think about cities know what does technology do in urban space but also what is painting no yeah I mean I think it's a really beautiful example of people making art together in order to protect each other in their communities another area of your activism that you've been working in for a long time is sort of trying to support the Kurdish people's fight for self-determination you have organized auctions to support the people's protection forces and worked with their java film collective and this goes back to a long time I know that you the film November here that is being shown me from 2004 is sort of about your friend Andrea wolf who fought with people's protection forces could you talk more about how that that came about in your work in that area yes so this this area of the world was nothing I was looking for right I didn't look for it it came looking for me it crashed into my life suddenly when said I received the news in 1998 that my childhood friend Andrea voice had been killed somewhere in Turkey in the mountains in an unknown location apparently in a sort of military fight and we heard some rumors that she had been extrajudicially executed and that was basically all we knew for many years in a couple years later I started making an essay film about what I remembered you know from her and try to juxtapose it to this kind of let's say her role as a political Martire in the Kurdish movement whereas I and her we had been making super 8 martial film movies when we were 17 so I tried to think through the unlikely juxtaposition of these very very different types of imagery and I started thinking about the role I mean this is in 2004 right this sounds very trivial now of travelling images and how how technology and at that time literally there was no not even YouTube the images that were transported were basically given from hand to hand on VHS tapes so that was November a sort of reflection on the role of the political hero and the Martire and actually a couple years later around 2012 or 2011 the site of this alleged massacre became known because there was a peace process in Turkey at that time and a lot of the mass graves that happened to be excavated during the long period of the unacknowledged civil war were suddenly becoming public it's not like the word is being discovered because people always knew where they were but they just couldn't talk about it so suddenly there was the news that someone had that the location where my friend was supposed to have been killed had become known and we went there it wasn't wasn't he easiest trip but it was very memorable and we ended up coming to some sort of small battlefield and the mountains were clearly a military conflict had taken place there were hundreds and thousands of ammunition cases and rocket shells and debris and also human bones interspersed within this whole mess and this this was the site which had had been somewhat cleaned up in the interim but it was still a battlefield and I had to digest this experience for quite a while but then I started basically tracing the trajectory of the weaponry of this debris I found on the battlefield just to try to figure out where it would lead me and it was no surprise that it won't lead me back to the metropolis where I lived and was basically a part of my daily environment going as far as discovering that you know many of the art spaces I was exhibiting in had basically links to the military armament companies that were involved in this massacre but at that point something else also happened because you know I went to this site and I had a very in a way I had an expectation that I would go and basically pick up the bones and try to reassemble the person I had known and then I went there and I realized it didn't make any sense it didn't make any sense right because you know there were 40 people all mixed into one another so basically the only chance I had of trying to even to comprehend this was to decide that all of them were my friends now you know there was no reason to try to separate them it's just all of them and since then I have been going back to the region know and have done many other works and have tried to follow the development of what transpired in the next few years which was momentous know mainly with the Syrian war of course with the carving out of sort of semi independent territory in northern Syria with the invasion of daesh or Islamic state into that territory and also into northern Iraq and so on and so on so there were many many different stages of these events transpiring and actually just a couple weeks ago I was planning to go back to northern Syria which is the area which is now under invasion and I had a plan I still have that plan actually and we I did apply to travel to that location and it was about something I had read in The Washington Post it was about art therapy what was it about apparently some Kurdish psychologists ran art therapy in some of the prisoners camp for the Islamic state what was the reason they said you know we can't keep them we have to release them after a while there's just too many and also if we keep them they are going to feel resentful and then this whole cycle of violence will be repeated so the best we can do is to give them some art therapy and hope for the best and hope for reconciliation and then we have to let them go I don't was super fascinated because I told myself well if this really works and I assumed it was working I mean just optimistically I hoped it would work then I thought these guys have found something like the Philosopher's Stone of art right it's like the Holy Grail it's like the thing we already would need to know not only to re-educate someone somewhere but you know in Germany there are so many people you know who need to convince using art therapy or whatever else you know to let go of this cycle of resentment and hatred and so on and so on so I really went there to try to find to talk to someone to find some kind of manual you know of how to do it how to use art to basically achieve this kind of transformation and then the invasion out and then what happened of the invasion yeah so you didn't learn what the course of therapy was and are you in touch now with people you worked with in in Java and most of them have evacuated at this point but so I think most of them have to have left the country at this point so uhm Parkdale gardeners are here in the audience tonight and this is an iteration of a project that you began in Berlin and then did in New York I was wondering about how you came to gardening as a way of interacting with with people and producing art did you have you garden to yourself at home in Berlin or I think you know I need to be respectful enough to plant to try to avoid coming too close if plants had feet they would run away but I love plants but they don't love me unfortunately but you're good at finding people who are loved by plants yes so basically I'm really dependent on people who are loved by plants and I love working with people I love by plants and plants yes and who did you work with in Berlin when you first realize dispatch it there maybe you could also it's called three plots right and the planters are shaped like free ports in Panama and Geneva how did you come to that idea of putting gardens and in free ports yes so I was suddenly exposed to the reality of tax free zones or free ports because an artwork by me was so to a connect and a realizing who that ended up in a free port I saw that on an invoice and I said well this is real it this really happens I was very naive I didn't really believe this would be the case but it was so I thought okay so now what can I do and so I just started some kind of inquiry or experiment which in a way is still ongoing it is an experiment so my idea was that you know the free port is of course a sort of extraterritorial territory for the purpose of tax dodge and also you know reduced liability jurisdiction whatnot Keller Easterling wrote a very beautiful book about these kind of zones called extra statecraft and I was thinking can I think about you know a similar kind of territory which is in a way non-traditional which is mobile which is not under you know traditional jurisdiction but which is in a way the contrary no of what a free port is is there a way to think about a territory which is co-produced which which which is mobile know which can travel and which still inspires different kinds of communities congregating around it so the first step was to travel and meet a horse that was close to burden who was the first first co-producer of this community and we acquired about two tons of the manual of the horse and started composting it and then donated it to a community can close to where I live in Berlin and then we made the first experiment with planters they chose to grow plants which reminded them of the areas in Panama for example they grew beans they used the planters for educational purposes and then my idea was basically to take along these planters through different locations and to repeat the same experiment over and over again in different with different with the help of different community gardens and at first I thought it would they would contribute the plants and we would you know have an exchange about the conditions of the community garden and so on and so on I didn't really realize it would go beyond that but in the first iteration I realized that basically the stories that came along with the growing were also part of the garden right they were also growing it was not only about growing plants but also about growing community and growing stories so I started to record some of those stories and to basically play them from the planters and it's an ongoing project and it's very much also an open inquiry for example one of the things I noticed in all three locations is that all three of them are in locations which are under massive pressure because of gentrification no so that's that's one thing that all three locations have in common so I'm trying to derive no principles from from from comparing these situations which are very similar because they are in all cases caused by similar conditions you know exploding real-estate cost then platform capitalism Airbnb but also massive influx of people into cities also creative class and so on so I hope that also you know in the back of my mind even though this is not the surface of the project this will also hope to establish you know some sort of catalogue not only of the difference of the locations but also their similarities yeah I think it's really interesting that this project there's something similar to what your videos do and that it finds very local or personal stories and shows how they're connected to international flows and you know phenomenon that are are happening in all over the world because of the way capital is connected globally and it also kind of makes me think of this sort of like international aspect to your work even as you are working more with communities makes me think of this remembrance you wrote for Oakley and Weezer who the curator who died earlier this year where you talked about his vision for an art world that is kind of a model for a progressive internationalism and do you think that is still possible in in art well I would certainly hope so I think right now it's becoming probably more difficult yes at the moment is really becoming more difficult but there is also a chance in this difficulty mm-hmm I think that definitely a model of the art world which we have known until 2016 you know that was characterized by biennials and lots of events and lots of you know fossil fuel travel around the world and specialization on you know a traveling class of people that would be called the art world that would you know jet around the globe all of that is not longer going to be sustainable and that was also the infrastructure you know for also many positive things that aqua would have called progressive internationalism that sort of managed to exist in some kind of niches of of these activities but I think that's no longer sustainable and I think this progressive internationalism that aqua code for has to be realized differently in what I would call something like a new vernacular write something that is very very situated in a concrete place and yet this concrete place I mean basically in most cities they are extremely diverse and basically all the internationalism one could be looking for is usually already available on-site right and I think that this is basically the constituency that you know anew an art world could develop as progressive internationalism from here on you mean by interacting with communities have I mean I'm also thinking about you've been in touch with citizen lab which is a research group in Toronto that is working on Human Rights and kind of cyber warfare or surveillance and does a lot of work in in different you know places around the globe better dealing with similar problems whether it is armies of twitter bots or the spy where do you think what they do provides a model for how you're interested in working or how you think artists could work yes I mean definitely I wouldn't be able to work like that because I'm lacking of course the the talent and the abilities to do the kind of engineering based and very technologically specialized work they do but I think it's fundamentally important now so just to explain the citizens lab is a Research Center affiliated to a part of Toronto University that does research into basically human rights abuses but also corporate abuses or censorship using digital technology and the Internet this goes from you know investigating clusters of fake news to you know Twitter bot deployment the influencing public opinion in authoritarian states and so on and so on and so I mean it's truly staggering the fascinating I'm a complete fan you know for me this it's like superhero but this is this is very important because usually you know right now the the ability to even understand let alone deploy this kind of technology is mainly in this in the hands of states and corporations so having public institutions were at least able to understand what is going on and to point it out this is extremely important right now so the the kind of limitations of the the current system of the art world came up and I also you you mentioned how the research you did after the death of your friend uncovered connections between art institutions and the military-industrial complex and that was you know in you know 15 years ago but now this is sort of all over the art news whether it's you know war in kandar's being leaving the board of the Whitney or Jana peel leaving her post at the serpentine as people protested their connections to to arms dealers and what I the conversation that I find really interesting among artists now is thinking about a kind of new direction for institutional critique which is not simply describing and pointing to the problems with existing systems but what's sometimes called building as critique it's about making new spaces and flexurally institutions that provide things that are not present in in the art world now whether that is equitable relationships among co-workers or you know providing adequate funding to artists and providing kind of access and care that institutions don't usually do is this something that you kind of see yourself doing and some of your more socially oriented projects or your organizing is this something that you are following yeah definitely so I think there's two two aspects to it no one is to start to build something new besides the existing art world and I think this is absolutely important it just takes a lot of time and also takes a lot of resources and I see it happening a lot in rural spaces or in in spaces which have been depopulated and where people are moving back in and that takes place also mainly not even in Western countries even though it also starts happening there because of you know renting the citizen and whatnot and this is these are locations where you know the notion of contemporary art has not been as rooted as of yet and the conditions are giving given to you know start building something also without too many resources so many new spaces opening that you know deal with aspects of the rural for example and I I'm very interested in that that's one thing the other thing is that I still think that existing art institutions are important because they also safeguard you know some kind of history and continuity they are also a work place for many people that's also something that should not be neglected it's not something it is basically an institution in my view that mainly belongs to the public and to the artists and you know is there to safeguard the collection and this is nothing that should be given up easily it's also part of you know ideally the common good and the public good and it shouldn't be just abandoned like this so I think it's really worth it you know to try to to claim those institutions also for the public good a few years ago you had a conversation with Laura Poitras that was published in our forum and there was a really interesting point of disagreement where she said that she thinks of selecting documents and organizations to work with as part of the research process where you were saying that kind of act of selecting an organization to work with or a set of documents is an aesthetic choice do you still feel that way do you kind of think of you know finding groups to work with now is sort of the you know the work that you're doing and your specific yeah I mean something like the group in Camden or the kind of activists you worked with and drill the the work that was shown in New York I mean is that or even like a gardening group do you feel like that is where your work is focused now kind of finding organizations and organizers to collaborate with well I think that's definitely one part of the work no it's not the the aesthetic aspect didn't simply vanish I think still it's a very important part of the political articulation know and Minh thing dissolve into realism the how is still for me a very important concern you know I mean most of these stories and trying to tell all kinds of open-ended inquiries which also involve a lot of risk and vulnerability because it's about me trying to figure out something right it's not that I know at the beginning the what's going to be the result at the end and involves failure it involves dead end it involves a lot of embarrassment right so it's like being naked on stage sometimes like oh my god I should not have done this but all of this happens you know during the inquiry and I still insist you know on exposing the process of you know inquiry or the seeking of information truth enlightenment call it whatever you wanted and to keep that transparent and not to take it as a given right very often now especially because there is so many fake news disinformation relativism and some people insist on getting the truth as a product they want something ready a fact you know by the New York Times it's in there right it's done you don't have to know how it was made if there was doubt involved if there was a process that that's that baby disappears behind the surface but I still well i still know that you know that's not how it works a fact is something that is also made that involves a production process along of course with trying to you know interpret material artifacts or you know pieces of evidence or impressions or images so this is one can call it aesthetic one can maybe also call it to accept the reality of doubt in your earlier works especially it may be in your works up to twenty sixteen you often will appear in the video maybe just briefly they're like in I think you're lovely Andrea they're scenes where you're directing the shots and sort of talking to the the cinematographer you're working with or in liquidity Inc you're sort of Corp you show your email correspondence with the institution that you're not meeting the deadline for but in your more recent works you are kind of you're out of the frame it is this process of research and documentary where you're working I think with bigger crews and with more people more subjects have you has this shift been deliberate have you kind of been aware of it happening or has it happened where organically I probably it is the case but I didn't really notice I didn't even feel that this was the case since I still think that you know the real poetry is basically the editing this is the real poetry of myself or in broken windows I think I'm the broken window honestly you know if you want to see me just look at the window being broken over and over again right so it's a bit displace because ultimately also you cannot show yourself in every film it's just so boring afterward you know I remember meeting Kentucky somewhere at an Exhibition he looks at me I said you you seem to own just one t-shirt it's like wearing the same t-shirt in every film so that's what you stop putting yourself in your films exactly I think that's all the questions I had is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to mention I would like to thank the gardener's so much and also John and Stephen and tissue involved with the garden No thank you so much it was such a lovely cooperation no thank you such a pleasure you

Channel: Art Gallery of Ontario

Views: 13,547

Keywords: ago, artist talk, hito steyerl, artist, art gallery of ontario, German art, contemporary art

Id: ts-dNHeBtdQ

Length: 40min 34sec (2434 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019