Hito Steyerl

Film as essayistic collage is central to Steyerl's works. She combines own recordings with scenes from Hollywood movies and documentary material in various works, operating within different rhythms and time intervals. Her films criticize an understanding of the documentary image as a bearer of history and authenticity and as an object of empathy and identification. In a time where imagery travels, is being reinterpreted, used and distributed more quickly than ever before, the image as document has lost its apparent authority as a witness. Simultaneously the documentation and communication of moments and situations has become common activity due to advances in technology. The image has itself become a restless and transitory object, ready for downloading, ripping, copying and recycling. Steyerl's works are based on experimenting with the documentary as form within specific geographical, political and thematic limitations. She turns the instability of the images into an advantage and makes reinterpretable objects of them, thus discussing the political dimension of the image in our surroundings. Steyerl does not hide the director's presence, she frequently stages herself in her films as an object among objects.