Hito Steyerl, Dancing Mania, 2020. Vue d’installation au K21, Düsseldorf, 2020. Courtesy : Hito Steyerl, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, Esther Schipper Gallery © Photo : Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf

By Nina Strand

Of all the exhibitions that were prevented from opening this year during the pandemic, I Will Survive – Espaces physiques et virtuels with Hito Steyerl at Centre Pompidou in Paris might be the most missed. The grand retrospective showing 20 works by Hito Steyerl at Centre Pompidou is currently waiting to be seen. Speculations are circulating that museums in France may be allowed to open in mid-May. Luckily, the German publisher Spector Books has produced a very comprehensive catalogue for the show, which is a small exhibition in itself, conceived by curator Doris Krystof at K21 in Düsseldorf – where the coproduced exhibition actually opened in September last year – and curators Florian Ebner and Marcella Lista from Pompidou. This very comprehensive and thorough publication will survive even if the actual show never opens. As Ebner explains, the idea was to create a referenced monograph on Steyerl: ‘It's rich in content and images, trying to provide a lot of information about each of the 20 exhibited works.’

In the introduction, the curators write that the aim is present a French/German perspective on Steyerl. ‘This is the first exhibition of this kind that exists on her in France’, Lista explains. ‘And she's not that well known here, except in university and artists' communities. Maybe what’s really French about this perspective is that we worked with her on the specific aspects of the social debate in France over the past year. And since the COVID-19 crisis, she’s been very interested in digging into the specificities of the French context.’

Steyerl’s new work SocialSim, consisting of video projections and a computer game, is made with this in mind, described as ‘a reflection of our society’s digital media overload that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic’. Lista elaborates: ‘It's really conceived on the template of a video game, a computer game, and among the parameters you can play with are these issues of the statistics of discrimination, pressure, intimidation and violence that were taken from official and independent sources of information here in France. And this version of the piece is called Rebellion (A bout de souffle) which is an homage to Jean-Luc Godard.’ Steyerl was keen to adapt the piece to the context ‘and see how the topics of her work would resonate in the country where so many of the philosophers she refers to have shaped critical culture with regard to media, cinema and post-cinema aesthetics.’

The building itself, the Centre Pompidou, was also of interest for Steyerl, Lista explains, as ‘a model of this notion of transparency that was important in modernism, but which also has its ambivalent sides. She was interested in the democratic utopia of the Centre Pompidou as the first cultural centre open to encouraging wider and sociologically diverse audiences to access culture.’

Hito Steyerl, This is the Future (détail), 2019.

As an artist dealing with the responsibility of being an artist, and working with the social role of art and the museum, Steyerl has stated that she observes the world as it is and then asks how it could be different. Her work addresses the responsibilities of museums today. She believes that the public museum and the art scene in general are under threat, and that this was so even before before the pandemic. They receive less and less funding, making the title of the exhibition poignant: I Will Survive. As the curator says, ‘Steyerl has used pop musical references in almost all her work from the year 2000, because she wants to include everyone. She has this unique ability to draw in so many with her video essays, always with many layers.’ Ebner adds that the show’s subtitle, Physical And Virtual Spaces, ‘indicates that I Will Survive isn’t only a response to the current crisis, but a retrospective, with many works, interacting and echoing each other, from the early critic of the rising nationalism in the public space of reunified Germany to the reflection on digital capitalism in the later pieces. And I think this transfers to what’s already happening in the world, because it’s currently this cut-up and collage situation.’

For someone like Steyerl, who claims that we're submerged by the many images around us and questions their digital truth, there’s much play with perspectives and disruptive situations in this show, the curators say. ‘In theory it might take eight hours to see everything’, says Ebner, ‘and you have all these different approaches to the question of the image in her different films. In November, there’s the notion of the travelling image, and then in How Not To Be Seen, you turn invisible in a world full of images. This Is The Future is about the idea of finally predicting the future and anticipating the image. She's working with the paradoxes of the image as a source of inspiration.’

Steyerl’s talk with Trevor Paglen at Pompidou in 2018 was packed with eager Steyerl fans. Even Lista and Ebner were surprised by the turnout: ‘She's bringing some interesting questions for the public today’, Ebner says, ‘and even if she doesn't have the answers, she’s formulating good questions and doing it with enough humour to make it not sound like homework. Lista agrees: ‘She's always flipping things around so you can see two sides of every issue. I think her message is that everything is unstable, and today, something can be seen from a different angle from tomorrow, which obliges us to revise our judgements or our perceptions. The strongest aspect of her work is to play with this instability and find a way to navigate the storm. Every time she addresses an issue it's really about finding the tools not to be its victim, but trying to acknowledge the situation fully in order to overcome it.’

Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (detail), 2013.

The exhibition Hito Steyerl I Will Survive – Espaces physiques et virtuels was scheduled to open at the Centre Pompidou 3rd of February. Due to the lockdown it is unlikely to open before mid-May, but it has been prolonged until 5 July.