Hito Steyerl

(b. 1966)

Berlin-based artist, filmmaker, and theoretician Hito Steyerl is a self-proclaimed “post-Internet artist,” interested in the circulation of images in a late-capitalist digitalized world. Her polemical, often humorous works merge documentary and essay forms with new technologies like augmented reality and artificial intelligence. They critique mass surveillance and data infrastructures, liquidity-driven capitalism, European and American authoritarianism, and the art world’s dependence on military expansion and the extraction of labor from the Global South. Her 2012 video Guards, commissioned for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, responds to a University of Chicago professor’s suggestion to increase armed museum security; interviewing museum guards with military and police experience, Steyerl’s film explores the “museum as battlefield,” intertwined with state structures of violence.