Hito Steyerl

Curated by: Suzana Milevska

November 27 - December 16, 2009
P74 Center and Gallery, Prusnikova 74, 1000 Ljubljana

Friday, Novmber 27, 2009, at 18.00: Q/A session with Hito Steyerl and Suzana Milevska
Friday, Novmber 27, 2009, at 19.30: Opening

Hito Steyerl, November, D, 2004 , 25:00 / Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea, J/AU/D, 2007, 30:00
Hito Steyerl, Red Alert 2, D, 2008, 1:30

Hito Steyerl's presentation in Ljubljana’s P74 is her first show in Slovenia. The exhibition consists of three separate but interrelated works that address issues as the limit of the image’s power for representing reality and conveying meaning, the potentiality of the image for transformation of reality, and the impact of the image circulation on power relations in society. Some of these issues will be addressed during the Q/A session with Hito Steyerl and Suzana Milevska (the curator of the project) on 27 November, at 6 pm. 

November (2004) is a homage to her friend Andrea Wolf imagined as a kind of multilayered video portrait unraveling Wolf’s "hagiography". Steyerl follows Wolf’s imagery starting from their teenage years when they were making naïve feminist DIY martial arts’ films together, to Wolf’s becoming a serious fighter for the Kurdish PKK, and ultimately, to her unofficial "beatification" in a revolutionary martyr’s "icon", after her tragic death. For Steyerl November is the month of revolution’s aftermath marked by the image’s victory over death, when the image cannot be fastened.

In Lovely Andrea (2007) the artist explores the theme of Japanese rope-bondage, a subgenre of pornography. The author’s pursue of a photo-series that she recorded as a student in Japan, subjects the viewer to a certain suspense story resulting in an unpredictable revelation of the image’s itinerary. Steyerl focuses on the ambivalence of the bondage as a universal metaphor of different radical ends of interpretation of the tied woman’s body: on the one hand, as a metaphor of gendered control society and on the other hand, as freedom and agency of the choice.

The work Red Alert 2 (2008)is an animation film that in an indirect way links November and Lovely Andrea. In this follow up to Red Alert (one of Steyerl’s three contributions at documenta 12) the author’s interest lays in questioning of the perception of visual metaphors due to the limits of the relation between the image and reality. In her red monochrome video triptych Steyerl refers to Alexander Rodchenko’s investigations of primary colours as the end of painting (Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour, 1921). However, for Steyerl red has been appropriated by society as an alert of both terror and pornography so among Steyerl’s chief concerns is the examination of the outer limit of the video medium as a "non-time based form" (Hito Steyerl’s interview, 16 July 2007, dmovies.net).

Hito Steyerl (born in 1966, Munich) is a filmmaker and author, who lives in Berlin. Her work has been featured at major exhibitions as 3. berlin biennial for contemporary art (2004), Manifesta 5 (2004), documenta 12 (2007), Shanghai Biennial (2008). Her most recent solo exhibition was held in the Berlin NBK (2009).

Contact:
Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E.
Center in Galerija P74
Prusnikova 74, 1000 Ljubljana
www.zavod-parasite.si
e-mail: p74info@volja.net
T:+386 (0)40 370 199