November 20th
Bad Resolutions:
Three By Hito Steyerl

November 20, 2015
8:00pm
@ Farewell Books
913 East Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX 78702 (map)
Admission: Free! (Donation Jar Awaits You!)

Programmed by Jennifer Stob and Tara Bhattacharya Reed

No contemporary video artist and theorist understands the visual environment we live in today as well as Hito Steyerl. Her work investigates digital media’s “bad resolutions”: its subversive political potential and its reproduction via bootlegs, damaged files and other “poor image” formats.

Born in 1966 in Munich, Germany, Steyerl’s highly acclaimed work has been featured in exhibitions at the Van Abbe Museum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London. Her work has been included in the 2015 and 2013 Venice Biennales, the 2013 Istanbul Biennial, the 2010 Gwangju and Taipei biennials, the 2008 Shanghai Biennale, Documenta 12, Kassel, in 2007 and Manifesta 5 in 2004.  Her publications include numerous articles in the art journal, e-flux and The Wretched of the Screen (Sternberg Press, 2012). Steyerl is a professor of Art and Multimedia at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Program

Lovely Andrea, 2007, digital video, 30 min.

In the late 1980s, Steyerl posed for a series of photographs as a rope bondage model. She travels to Tokyo in an effort to find the photos, and comes away instead with a more profound philosophical meditation on bondage as a metaphor for political, financial and representational desires.

In Free Fall, 2010, digital video, 32 min.

Steyerl’s In Free Fall plunges headfirst into the chills and thrills of overturning all-powerful views from above. This essay film cleverly weaves together an airplane junkyard in the California desert, global economic turbulence, Hollywood blockbusters and myriad digital image appropriations into a meditation on capitalism’s technological hubris.

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, digital video, 14 min.

This is a user’s guide on the difficulty of being and being left alone in the 21st century. An instructional video that purposefully fails to instruct, How Not to Be Seen nevertheless leaves viewers all the wiser about the numerous, intersecting forces that impact our lives and that cannot be contained or explained by visual illustrations.

Special thanks to Hito Steyerl and the Andrew Kreps Gallery for their generous support of this screening.