Hito Steyerl Quotes

Hito Steyerl

Profession : Director

Birth : January 1, 1966

To brutally summarise a lot of scholarly texts, contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital, plus the Internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories and growing income inequalities. Let's add asymmetric warfare, real-estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering and deregulated financial markets.

Hito Steyerl

Inequality is pervasive but invisible. It's hard to see. You need a sort of tool to make it visible.

Hito Steyerl

Gaming has a certain form in which it is organized. It has different levels and a sense of participation. Achievement is very important. You are constantly judged in relation to earning points. I think that's a way many people have learned to understand the world.

Hito Steyerl

I don't think the Internet or a big digital corporation will manage to capture all of human relations. It's too boring. After a while, people want to talk to one another, one on one.

Hito Steyerl

A building is a very interesting frame. You always get a sort of sample of different people inside a building.

Hito Steyerl

I'm all for health and safety regulations. But the thing I don't understand is this: to put up a video, there's a ton of health and safety regulations, which are really irrational, to the point of not being able to show an artwork. Then, when it comes to real people, where is health and safety?

Hito Steyerl

I think art's role is to investigate the way things are comprehended - the lenses through which people see. In conflict, these lenses tend to be very standardised, very stereotypical.

Hito Steyerl

Most of my work has always been online. But I try not to share it on commercial or corporate platforms, so you will find very little of it on YouTube. It's mostly hidden in plain sight, meaning that it's on platforms that are not Google searchable, which technically makes them part of the dark web.

Hito Steyerl

What institutions or galleries assume is that videos are available and that they can just stream them for free without taking into account any sort of production cost or anything like that because the web is seen as a sphere of distribution of things that are free.

Hito Steyerl

I am focusing more on finding ways to improve situations rather than creating evidence or doing any form of consciousness-raising.

Hito Steyerl

I'm trying to find ways to transform parts of the art world into something more productive or more satisfying.

Hito Steyerl

I felt I needed to start looking outside the gallery into the neighbourhood because otherwise I would just circulate in this museum bubble. It's like going from airport to airport.

Hito Steyerl

I never got into being an artist. For me, it's always more research, storytelling, maybe technological experimental. It's more like a laboratory setting.

Hito Steyerl

I've always been interested in exploring technique in relation to technology.

Hito Steyerl

Life is just embarrassing.

Hito Steyerl

As a dialectical materialist, I do not believe that social contradictions can be solved individually. On the other hand, if you give up on trying to articulate them altogether, you end up being depressed and cynical. So you navigate between different impossibilities and keep failing in all directions, obviously. But what's the alternative?

Hito Steyerl

I don't like being lectured - and I expect my viewers don't either.

Hito Steyerl

If you want to make a difference with art, which is a motive I perceive as questionable, then the single most stupid approach would be to tell people off. It would be a surefire way not to get through to people.

Hito Steyerl

I think my approach is best summarised with the colloquial elephant in the room. These elephants are everywhere, but people pretend they aren't there. That's something that irritates me in a fundamental way.

Hito Steyerl

I don't even have a high school degree. So I'm really used to being talked down to, and seen as someone who doesn't have the education to comprehend. This is why I always try to create an entrance level for works.

Hito Steyerl