Circulationism. Hito Steyerl

Circulationism is the first solo exhibition by German artist Hito Steyerl to be presented in Mexico. The show brings together three of her recent works: Adorno’s Grey, Museum as Battlefield (2012) and Liquidity Inc. (2014). These make apparent a reworking of the connection between image, story, politics and documentary, themes that have characterized her work since the 1990s.

Using video installations and reflection in essays, Steyerl presents a critical apparatus for analyzing the way in which the images produced by television, cinema and contemporary art are inscribed in a visual and economic regime. These are produced, circulated, distributed and consumed in a framework of audiovisual capitalism and form part of different institutional mechanisms of the art world, including the museum. From this perspective, the images are converted into a vehicle of social relations with an ambivalent status insofar as they are both commodity and means of political statement. A second problem raised by the artist is the truth condition of images. Her work repeatedly makes use of appropriated or poor-quality images, together with documentary-type elements, with the aim of questioning the relationship between documentary, reality and representation.

In Steyerl’s thinking there is a creative collision between history, research, experience and theory, in a constant interrogation of the specters of emancipation and images of capitalism. While Adorno’s Grey (2012) addresses the legends of critical theory through a forensic investigation of the place where Theodor Adorno delivered his final academic course in 1969, Is the Museum as Battlefield (2012) empirically connects the art institution with contemporary military power. Meanwhile, Liquidity Inc. (2014)—Steyerl’s most recent work—offers a parody of the metaphors of the “fluidity” of financial capital. Her works emphasize the complex relationship between criticism and social power, through the use of irony as a refined form of institutional critique, at the same time as presenting a thorough analysis of contemporary visuality.