Duty Free Art and Supercommunity

Hito Steyerl in conversation with Nina Power
Panel discussion with e-flux editors Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, and Brian Kuan Wood
Featuring contributions from Adrian Lahoud and David Hodge

In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as a fictional currency in a global futures market that has nothing to do with the works themselves? Can we distinguish between creativity and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring artifacts as diverse as video games, Wikileaks files, the proliferation of spam, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

e-flux’s Supercommunity sees leading artists, theorists and writers exhume the dystopian and utopian futures contained within the present. Invited to exhibit at the 56th Venice Biennale, e-flux journal produced a single issue over a four-month span, publishing an article a day both online and on site from Venice. In essays, poems, short stories, and plays, artists and theorists trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life, in which art, the internet, and globalization have shed their utopian guises but persist as naked power, in the face of apocalyptic ecological disaster and against the claims of the social commons.

Biographies

Hito Steyerl is one of the leading artists working in video today. Her work explores the divisions between art philosophy and politics. She has had solo exhibitions at, amongst others, MOCA, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA, London and has participated in the Venice Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, documenta and Manifesta. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern. She is the author of The Wretched of the Screen and writes in numerous periodicals. She is currently a professor of new media art at the Berlin University of the Arts.

e-flux is a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise which was founded in 1998. Its news digest, events, exhibitions, schools, journal, books, and the art projects produced and/or disseminated by e-flux describe strains of critical discourse surrounding contemporary art, culture, and theory internationally. Its monthly publication e-flux journal has produced essays commissioned since 2008 about cultural, political, and structural paradigms that inform contemporary artistic production.