Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive

Book excerpt: A massive, long-overdue retrospective on the multimedia image critique of Hito Steyerl, influential artist and author of Duty-Free Artand The Wretched of the Screen Over the past 30 years, through video and installation, the immensely influential German artist and writer Hito Steyerl (born 1966) has been tracking the ways that images have mutated--from the analogue image and its manifold possibilities for montage to the fluidity of the split digital image--and the implications these mutations have had for the representation of wars, genocides and the flow of capital. "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. At nearly 500 pages, this book--the first substantial overview on Steyerl--looks at multimedia installations and film projects of the past ten years, as well as earlier works, all of which are united by the artist's unflagging interrogation of the politics of the image.