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9/10/2015

Hito Steyerl

Tensta Konsthall, Spanga

Liquidity Inc. by Hito Steyerl, as part of The New Model. “Be water, my friend” reads the initial phrase in Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc. (2014), a video installation about the formless, floating, violent, and simultaneously vital water. In Liquidity Inc., water gushes out of television screens and iPhone screen savers. It functions both as a liquid and as an inexhaustible metaphor: the liquefied form of capital, the dot-com bubble when it bursts.

Using montage as its idiom, Liquidity Inc. tells the story of Jacob Wood, a martial arts enthusiast who lost his job when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis. Wood was born during the Vietnam War and came to the US as part of President Gerald Ford's Operation Babylift, an extensive adoption program in which several thousands of homeless and orphaned children were adopted from Vietnam and brought to the United States. Wood's story is interspersed with footage from boxing matches and weather disasters, Hito Steyerl’s own chat conversations, and images from an ocean and a horizon where the water seems to speak in its own typeface: “I am water. I'm not from here.”

The digital images evoke unexpected, elegant, and sometimes unpleasant associations. A recurring image depicts animated bodies that fall lifeless into the depth. Another, more surreal element is the weather report—or perhaps the State of the World report—where a person dressed in a black balaclava rebelliously comments on the trade winds. “Your emotions affect the weather,” says the anchor in front of a world map where all boundaries are defined and laid bare, revealing the collapsed states, the stateless, the plundered.

With Liquidity Inc., Steyerl consolidates her position as a playful, connected, and urgent artist. The thirty minute video is equally a story about the lack of contours and about control, about Inc., Incorporation. About water as a company, and the company as a movement in water that infiltrates, washing across all bodies.

Liquidity Inc. is on view as the final part of The New Model, a project initiated by Tensta konsthall in 2011. The New Model’s starting point is Palle Nielsen’s The Model: A model for a qualitative society that was installed at Moderna Museet in fall 1968. By transforming Moderna Museet into an adventure playground for children, Nielsen - together with Gunilla Lundahl and a number of urban activists - wanted to provide them with the opportunity to “be themselves” and express their own reality. The models’
main themes and key issues were artistic research, the right to the city, the child as an active 
historical subject, and the critical use of the art institution. Participants in The New Model—Lars Bang Larsen, Magnus Bärtås, Ane Hjort Guttu, Dave Hullfish Bailey, and Hito Steyerl—have been invited
 to investigate the heritage from The Model in a number of projects, seminars, workshops and exhibitions. (Steyerl’s contribution is an already existing work.) Some of the central questions are as follows: how can the potential of art as a form of knowledge be explored in relation to contemporary social situations? What new social models can art suggest? And what do the aesthetics of model building look like?

As part of The New Model, two seminars, one group exhibition and three commissions by Magnus Bärtås, Ane Hjort Guttu and Dave Hullfish Bailey have taken place.

The first seminar came about at Blå huset in Tensta on Saturday, 8.10, 2011 and featured presentations by critic Lars Bang Larsen and artists Magnus Bärtås, Dave Hullfish Bailey and Hito Steyerl.

The second seminar took place on 11.3, 2012 and was titled The Model and the City: A Seminar on Palle Nielsen’s project The Model (Moderna Museet 1968) and Tensta. With Palle Nielsen, Gunilla Lundahl and Erik Stenberg.

The exhibition The Society Without Qualities was curated by Lars Bang Larsen as part of The New Model. It took place from February-May 2013 and included works by Søren Andreasen (Copenhagen), Archizoom (Milan), Ane Hjort Guttu (Oslo), Jakob Jakobsen (Copenhagen), Sture and Ann Charlotte Johannesson (Malmö), Learning Site (Copenhagen/Malmö), Sharon Lockhart (Los Angeles), Joanna Lombard (Stockholm), Palle Nielsen (Copenhagen).

The Society Without Qualities revisited some of the concerns of the 1960s, such as education, militancy, experimental urban planning, the child as an active historical subject, and the critical use of the art institution. Unlike Palle Nielsen’s legendary Modellen at Moderna Museet in 1968, however, The Society Without Qualities asked what it would mean to proceed without a model or an image of the society to come; what it would mean to not project any figurative qualities onto the future.

The Miracle in Tensta (Theoria) by Magnus Bärtås was shown during the summer of 2014.

This Place is Every Place by Ane Hjort Guttu was a shown in the fall of 2015.

School Section by Dave Hullfish Bailey took part during the fall of 2015.

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer with an interest in the instability of images, in how they are produced, wrapped, distributed, and consumed. With a unique precision, Steyerl examines the digital state and its relation to violence and capitalism. Steyerl teaches New Media at the University of Arts, Berlin. Notable exhibitions include her contribution to the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, dOCUMENTA 12, biennales in Shanghai, Gwangju, Taipei, and Berlin, as well as Manifesta 5. Steyerl has contributed to several publications, including Beyond Representation (2012), The Colour of Truth (2008), and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (edited together with Maria Lind, 2008). In 2006, Steyerl held a six month studio residency at Iaspis.

"The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements, and the Struggle for Social Justice"
Symposium: Saturday, October 17, 10am–6pm
The symposium forms the starting point of a multi-year inquiry into the relationship between art and solidarity movements, performed in a series of exhibitions, workshops, presentations, and film screenings. Faced with fascist parties gaining ground in Europe and an increasingly tough social climate, we see the necessity to return to the notion of solidarity in order to try its validity today. Will solidarity still be relevant in the future, or is it a historical concept? Do we need to find new ways to describe the political movements of today and their struggles, sympathies, and commitments? Some of the invited speakers are Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (Metz), Filipa César (Berlin), Kodwo Eshun (London), Stefan Jonsson (Norrköping), Kristine Khouri (Beirut), Doreen Mende (Berlin), Bojana Piskur (Ljubljana), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Berlin/Tehran), Rasha Salti (Beirut), Rojda Sekersöz (Stockholm), Gulf Labor/Ashok Sukumaran (Mumbai), Dmitry Vilensky (St Petersburg), and Marion von Osten (Berlin).

Transmission from the Liberated Zones by Filipa César
October 17, 2015–January 17, 2016
Saturday, October 17, 7–9pm opening for Filipa César's new film Transmission from the Liberated Zones, commissioned by Tensta konsthall. Filipa César's extensive research has focused particularly on the position moving images hold for the liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau and on the ways film was used both as a strategy to make the people aware of the struggle and as a tool for visual nation building. The international presence allowed an insight into the specific conflict. In conversations with Swedish filmmakers Lennart Malmer and Ingela Romare, former speaker of the parliament Birgitta Dahl, and UN observer Folke Löfgren, the linear story is mixed with documents, photographs, and clear memories. They reminisce about scents, endless marches, and the meaning of wearing guerrilla uniforms. These memories are linked together by what appears as an experience of an embodied solidarity.

Press contact
Asrin Haidari T: +46 8 360763 asrin@tenstakonsthall.se

Tensta konsthall
Taxingegränd 10 163 04 SPÅNGA SWEDEN
Hours
Wednesday 12-21
Thursday-Friday 12-18
Saturday-Sunday 12-17
Free entrance. Voluntary donation.

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