Hito Steyerl IMA

Retrospective Exhibition

2015
Brisbane, AU
Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh
Type: Exhibition Architecture

Commissioned by Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh

IMA

Credits
  • Exhibition Architecture: Studio Miessen
  • Project Leader: Markus Miessen, Diogo Passarinho
  • Photography: IMA, Brisbane

13 December 2014–22 March 2015

Curated by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh in association with Annie Fletcher

The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is pleased to present Too Much World, the first survey in Australia of the artist, writer, and filmmaker Hito Steyerl. Running from 13 December 2014 to 22 March 2015, this comprehensive exhibition features six works from the past decade, including Liquidity Inc., which premiered early 2014.

Steyerl is a leading figure in the critical articulation of how the Internet, digital technologies, and images are transforming life, work, and politics. Her videos offer timely, insightful, and entertaining perspectives on the plethora of images that swirl around us and are appropriated, edited, and recirculated in an endless and accelerating flow. Her video installations comprise self-reflexive combinations of specific technologies and bespoke environments that elaborate on the content of the moving image. Her masterful use of montage echoes the everyday pace and practices of the digital age, revealing truths and potentials, with an innovative approach to documentary practice.

In a recent essay entitled Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, Steyerl focuses on the term ‘circulationism’ as way of understanding the contemporary potential of art and the image. She suggests: “What the Soviet avant-garde of the twentieth century called productivism–the claim that art should enter production and the factory–could now be replaced by circulationism. Circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but of post-producing, launching, and accelerating it. It is about the public relations of images across social networks, about advertisement and alienation, and about being as suavely vacuous as possible.”

Steyerl was born in Munich in 1966 and is currently based in Berlin where she is Professor of Art and Multimedia at the University of Arts. She has had numerous exhibitions across Europe and North America, most recently at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; ICA, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (all 2014), and the Venice and Istanbul biennials (both 2013).