Hito Steyerl

Biography

Hito Steyerl is a moving image artist, writer and professor. Born in Munich in 1966 to a German father and a Japanese mother, she expressed an interest in film and moving images in her early teens, under the influence of the New German Cinema. She attended the Japan Institute of the Moving Image in Kawasaki, continuing her studies at the University of Television and Film in Munich. She completed her doctoral work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Artistic practice

Steyerl has adopted an approach to image-based media which uniquely sets her apart from mainstream image culture. Citing Harun Farocki and her former professor the film art historian Helmut Färber as her primary influences, Steyerl defines herself as a post-internet artist, manipulating tools of digital technology to come to grips with the social issues of militarization, surveillance migration, the role of media in globalization, and the methods involved in disseminating images and the cultures that accrue around them. Steyerl implements a research-based approach in her work.

Her upbringing in Bavaria during the premiership of Franz Josef Strauss attuned her to the concealment of unpleasant truths about governments, institutions and individuals, awakening within her an instinct to uncover taboos. Through her moving image art she also expresses a fascination with the ability of images to “travel”, i.e. to acquire different meanings outside of their original contexts. Steyerl refrains from conveying openly didactic messages through her art, stating that “It would be pointless if art worked like that… I don’t like being lectured – and I expect my viewers don’t either.”

Impact on the art world

Steyerl's innovative work has catapulted her to the top of the art world. ArtReview proclaimed her the most influential artist in their Power 100 list for 2017 for her “political statement-making and formal experimentation”, making her the first woman to top the list. Her work has been displayed at solo exhibitions at: Chisenhale Gallery, e-flux, Art Institute of Chicago, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Arts Los Angeles, Serpentine Galleries, Stedelijk Museum and others. Her work has also been included in a number of biennials, such as: documenta 12, Manifesta 5, Shanghai Biennial in 2008, Taipei and Gwangju Biennials in 2010, Venice Biennale in 2019 and Istanbul Biennial. 

Awards and recognitions

For her outstanding and revolutionary work in the field of moving image art, Steyerl has received the following awards: NEW VISION Award from CPH:DOX (2010); EYE Prize from Eye Filmmuseum (2015); Käthe Kollwitz Prize (2019). In 2021, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier for her contributions to art, but declined it in protest of how the German government handled the COVID-19 crisis.

Writing and teaching

Apart from her work in moving images, Steyerl is also a prolific writer, publishing articles for art journals such as e-flux, but also books such as The Wretched of the Screen (2012) and Hito Steyerl: Too Much World (2014). Her 2009 essay "In Defense of the Poor Image" is a canonical text in the field of critical media studies. She served as a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she is a co-founder of the Research Center for Proxy Politics. In 2024, she accepted a position teaching current digital media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Further resources

Steyerl maintains a presence online through her Instagram account. She is represented by Esther Schipper Gallery.