Hito Steyerl, I will survive, 2021

The positions adopted by Hito Steyerl in her works and texts are of key importance in any consideration of the contemporary role that art and the museum play in society. They are also crucial to experimental forays into different forms of media presentation and to the critical examination of artificial intelligence and its uses. Over the past thirty years, the artist has been tracking the way camera images have mutated, from the analogue image and its manifold possibilities for montage to the fluidity of the split digital image and the implications this then had for the representation of wars, genocides, and capital flows. “We are no longer dealing with the virtual but with a confusing and possibly alien concreteness that we are only beginning to understand,” writes Brian Kuan Wood of the digital visual worlds that the artist presents. The book is being published in conjunction with Hito Steyerl’s survey show, which will take place in autumn 2020 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. The cooperative project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.