No one can currently connect the dots between art, drone warfare, chatbots and global financial speculation with as much wit and pizzazz as artist Hito Steyerl. The film essays of Käthe Kollwitz Prize winner Hito Steyerl recall Paul Virilio’s “War and Cinema,” where the media theorist equates the invention of the film camera to that of the automatic weapon. Just exactly how the transfer of images echoes that of bullets is illustrated in the video work “Abstract” (2012), presented at the beginning of the show. Here, Steyerl connects the Pariser Platz, the epicenter of touristy Berlin, with a battle zone in eastern Turkey where Kurdish fighters were killed in 1998 using a classic shot-reverse shot technique. Steyerl’s last camera shot confirms that the angle is not chosen arbitrarily: Just a few meters away from the Brandenburg Gate, the camera lingers on the Berlin representative office of armaments group Lockheed Martin, manufacturers of deadly ammunition. (Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; images: Andreas FranzXaver Süß, film still: Hito Steyerl; Courtesy: the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin)
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, Berlin–Mitte; map
Hito Steyerl, 2019 Käthe Kollwitz Prize recipient, 20.02–14.04.2019
Tue–Sun 11–19h
