Hito Steyerl. Factory of the Sun

MAIN ATTRACTION AT THE VENICE BIENNAL

The video installation by German artist Hito Steyerl was presented for the first time at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015. The highly visual art work quickly became a crowd puller and was probably the most talked about art piece at the important biennale. After its triumphal progress in Venice, the installation has been exhibited at exhibition sites of repute such as Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, HMKV in Dortmund, and is, at this very moment, exhibited at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. When the exhibition opens at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in the beginning of December, it will be for the very first time the highly praised Factory of the Sun is on view in Scandinavia. Later on, the work will be exhibited at the approved art museum Kiasma in Helsinki.

AN IMMERSIVE VIDEO INSTALLATION

Factory of the Sun is much more than just an ordinary video shown on a screen, which is one of the reasons why the work has aroused excitement at exhibition sites around the World. As a matter of fact, you’re physically entering the art work by stepping inside a black box, specially build for the purpose, with luminous wire netting on the lines of the sci-fi classic Tron. From a deck chair you can watch the central part of the installation – a 23-minute-long movie – projected on to a big screen and immerse yourself by the soundtrack. Factory of the Sun is a highly immersive experience.

CRITISICM OF SURVEILLANCE

In Factory of the Sun Steyerl deals especially with how technology and pictures can be used for surveillance and to suppress a section of the population, but also to fight back against the system. Through an absurd story – created by a mix of news coverage, documentaries, video games and dance videos, Steyerl tells a story about workers, who are forced to create sunlight by moving in a motion-caption studio. But, the workers have the opportunity to fight back against those in power, by dancing instead of just doing the physical movements, they are instructed to in the game Factory of the Sun. However, the lines between game and reality are blurred, and the fight about light and energy take place not only in the game but also in the reality of the story.

AMONG THIS YEARS MOST INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966 in Munich) is regarded as one of the most influential contemporary artists this year. She has exhibited all over the World from Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Chisenhale Gallery, London and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid to Artists Space, New York, Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and Gwangju Biennalen in South Korea. Hito Steyerl’s importance is underlined by the matter of fact, that she was recently ranked to be the 7th most influential person in contemporary arts, a listing drawn up by one of the most leading art journals, ArtReview.

The German visual artist and moviemaker has a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and she is Professor in New Media at the Berlin University of the Arts.

She is given the credit for her part in the development of the genre “essay-documentary” and aside from her media based art, she is also acknowledged for her research work. Furthermore, she is the author of several published books such as The Wretched of the Screen (2013) and Too Much World (2014). Factory of the Sun is presented in cooperation with Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Dortmund and Goethe Institut Dänemark and is financially supported by Statens Kunstfond.

Exhibition hashtag: #factoryofthesun