Conversations at the Edge: Current Schedule

2004–09, Hito Steyerl, Germany/USA, multiple formats, ca. 63 minutes + discussion
Presented in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Contemporary Art, which presents "focus: Hito Steyerl” November 1, 2012–January 27, 2013

Hito Steyerl’s masterfully orchestrated video essays chart the lives of images, objects, and places to arrive at provocative new conclusions about their meaning. Through interviews, appropriated footage, and her own personal Super-8 and photographic archive, she imaginatively explores the shifting social, political, and economic implications of her subjects. This program presents two of her essay films: In Free Fall (2010), a bold meditation on the current global economic crisis examined through an airplane junkyard in California’s Mojave Desert, and Lovely Andrea (2007), which examines the circulation and economy of images through Steyerl’s seemingly impossible quest to find a photograph taken of her for a Japanese bondage magazine 20 years prior. 

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) is a video artist, filmmaker, theorist, author, and journalist. Her work has been featured at big exhibitions such as the 2004 Berlin Biennial, Manifesta 5, 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam, documenta 12, and the 2008 Shanghai Biennial. She holds a PhD in philosophy and works on the borderline between cinema and visual art, combining elements of experimental film, auteur cinema, documentary, and video art to undertake cutting post-colonial and feminist critiques of representation. She is a professor for media art at the University of Arts Berlin and has taught film and theory at (amongst other institutions) Goldsmiths College and Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies.