Hito Steyerl

Red Alert

June 15 – July 27 2008

Red Alert is the title of the first solo show by Hito Steyerl (b. 1966 in Munich, lives and works in Berlin) in Switzerland. The title comes from the work with the same name that was presented at Documenta 12 in Kassel. It is also symptomatic for all of Steyerl’s work is in this show. Red Alert (2007) consists of three computer monitors that show only one monochrome video still. It is the color, which the US Homeland Security uses as the highest Terrorism-Threat level.
In the connection to the theme of terrorism in Red Alert is the work November (2004), in which Steyerl remembers Andrea, her best friend at age 17. Andrea ran with the RAF and went to Kurdistan to join the women’s army in the working party of PKK; eventually she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist by the Turkish army in captivity. It is not by accident that the work Lovely Andrea (2007) plays opposite of November. The similarity in these two works is not about the theme of terrorism but rather the personal memory of the artist, which forms the starting point for both of the works. In Lovely Andrea Hito Steyerl is searching for the bondage photos that were taken in 1987 when she was a student in Japan.
Finally, in Journal No. 1 (2007), we are taken from personal memory to collective memory.  Journal No. 1 received its name from the first newscast in Bosnia in 1947. It was destroyed in the Balkan war in the beginning of the 1990s. Steyerl’s work tries to recreate the lost original scenes form the archive. This causes one to reflect on memories forgotten, whether it be from the individual or collective memory and history. It is about the question of conservation and the final closure of the visual memory of a community. The body of work shown at the Kunsthalle does not simply portray typical meshing of the vivid image association of Steyerl’s individual works but rather takes it one step further: The multiple interpretations of History correlate to the incompleteness of the personal memory.

Oliver Kielmayer