The presentation in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein is artist and film-maker Hito Steyerl’s first solo show at a German institution. Her work has been featured at big exhibitions such as the 3. berlin biennial for contemporary art (2004), Manifesta 5 (2004), documenta 12 (2007), or the Shanghai Biennial (2008). Trained as a filmmaker, she holds a PhD in philosophy and works on the borderline between cinema and visual art, combing elements of experimental film, auteur cinema, documentary, and video art to undertake cutting post-colonial and feminist critiques of representation.

Her films are a montage of pop and politics, Hollywood and independent film, interviews and voice-over commentaries, all combined into provocative filmic analyses of the present. In her new film After the Crash (2009), Steyerl tells the story of the current global economic crisis through the example of airplane junkyard in the Californian desert. In the double projection In/Dependence (2008), Steyerl returns to the theme of Japanese bondage, a subgenre of pornography that she already explored in her earlier film Lovely Andrea (2007). In Do you speak Spamsoc (2008), she examines the logic of “Spamsoc” as its own language of translation on the covers of pirated Chinese DVDs. The film November (2004) tells the story of Steyerl’s teenage friend Andrea Wolf, who later become a fighter for the PKK, while the animation film Red Alert 2 (2008) follows up on the reception of Red Alert (2007), one of Steyerl’s contributions to documenta 12. The n.b.k Videoforum will feature the documentation The Building (2009), an intervention on migration and national socialism that Steyerl made in the framework of the European Cultural Capital Linz 09.

Publication

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with an introduction by Marius Babias and texts by T.J. Demos and Bert Rebhandl. This 168 page color illustrated German-English volume will appear with the publishing house of Walther König, Cologne. In spring 2010 the book series “n.b.k discourse” will also feature a collection of essays by Hito Steyerl.

Program

Saturday, August 29, 2009, 7 pm

On Film and Ideology (in English)

Films and discussion about the relationship between ideology and film through Sergej Tretyakov’s biography of the object applied to aeroplanes, Jean Genet’s interview for Arena in 1985 and some of the problems of cultural Maoism with Phil Collins (artist, Glasgow/Berlin), Pablo Lafuente (co-editor Afterall, London; associate curator Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo), Hito Steyerl (artist, Berlin)

Thursday, September 3, 2009, 6 pm

Exhibtion tour with Marius Babias (curator)

Thursday, September 17, 2009, 6 pm

Exhibition tour with Sophie Goltz (communication / education n.b.k.)

Thursday, October 1, 2009, 7 pm

Is a museum a factory?

Round table on “Video art in institutions” with Sabine Breitwieser (curator, Vienna), Thomas Elsaesser (film historian, Amsterdam), Hito Steyerl (artist, Berlin)

Moderated by Bert Rebhandl (film critic, Berlin)

Sunday, October 18, 2009, 8 pm

Long film night with Clemens von Wedemeyer (artist and film-maker, Berlin)