4TheRcrd Mag.

4TheRcrd Magazine in partnership with VIVO would like to give away a few passes to this spectacular event. Curious what this is, read on!

Visiting professor for Cultural and Gender Studies, at University of Arts, Berlin; Steyerl has published filmic and written essays centered around questions of globalization, urbanism, racism and nationalism. She is involved in the movement of feminist migrants and women of color in Germany. She recently exhibited at Documenta 12. Her films and videos include: Germany and Identity, 1994, Land of Smiles 1996, Babenhausen 1997, The Empty Centre, 1998, Normalität, 1999-2001.

November (2004) tackles the question of what is nowadays called terrorism and used to be known as internationalism. It deals with the gestures and postures it can create, and their relationship to figures of popular culture, namely cinema. It’s point of departure is a feminist martial arts film Andrea Wolf and I made together when we were 17 years old. Now this fictional flic has become a document. November is not a documentary about Andrea Wolf. It is not a film about the situation in Kurdistan. It deals with the gestures of liberation after the end of history, as reflected through popular culture and traveling images. This project is a film about the era of November, when revolution seems to be over and only it’s gestures keep circulating. – Hito Steyerl

VIVO Media Arts will launch a series of events and exhibitions on defunct ideologies with a screening of two works by Berlin video artist and cultural theorist, HITO STEYERL. LOVELY ANDREA and NOVEMBER (2004) are bound together as “images which travel within the flows of media globalisation… they are about the changing meaning of these images.”

LOVELY ANDREA (2007)

Bondage is everywhere. I bind; you bind; we are bound. The art of knot tying is not just popular in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. I spin; you spin; we are connected. Networks and webs, suspense and dependency: we are hooked. A photo from 1987 shows me naked bound with ropes. The photo was taken in Tokyo and presents the Japanese bondage technique Nawa Shibari. Lovely Andrea depicts the search for this obscure porno picture in the Tokyo bondage scene, in sex archives and amongst those specialists who understand bare life as art. – Hito Steyerl

“An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny. And the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable”. – Agamben, ‘Notes on Politics’ Means Without End, 2000

IMAGE CREDIT: http://www.videoinstudios.com/images/hito_3.jpg