Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl (born in Munich in 1966) works at the interfaces between fine arts and film and between theory and practice. She has been probing the tensions between power, violence, and capital in essayistic documentary films,  installations, and texts since the late 1980s. Global financial flows, neoliberal working conditions, and interconnections between private business and politics are among the subjects of her work, alongside the power of images to convey information and their impact through dissemination in the media.

Die leere Mitte (The Empty Centre), 1998

Video, 62 min

Normalität 1-X (Normality 1-X), 1999–2001

Video, 37:11 mi

In her films Die leere Mitte and Normalität 1-X, Hito Steyerl considers the aftereffects of oppressive regimes. She focuses in particular on post-reunification Germany and the issue of nationalism. In Die leere Mitte (The Empty Centre), Steyerl traces the architectural and sociopolitical changes that take place on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz over a period of eight years. From an empty field between the borders during the Cold War, the area gradually became a sought-after location for major international companies in the years after 1990. Through a film montage of interviews and archival materials, Steyerl shines a light on urban transformations that show both the restructuring that has come with globalization and the continued existence of social and political boundaries. The film reveals that the process of constructing a center of political and economic power also always requires some element of exclusion, particularly of immigrants and minority groups. Steyerl’s ten-part essay film Normalität 1-X (Normality 1-X) deals with the normalization of racist and anti-Semitic violence in Germany and Austria around the start of the new millennium. The work consists of ten short episodes about antisemitic and racially motivated acts of violence committed in both countries after German reunification. They make it clear how the legacy of National Socialism persists in pervasive symbolic and physical violence, but is largely ignored by policymakers and the public. The violence is perceived as normal.