Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019. Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl's artistic discourse orbits socio-political processes in theory and practice: post-colonial criticism, abuse of power, violence and the influences of globalisation on the financial, labour and goods markets are visualised in various media. The artist responds to the influence of the digital and the global that increasingly dominates everyday life by assembling and disassembling images, texts, performances, multimedia installations and essayistic documentaries. Together with other installations, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2017 developed for the Skulptur Projekte in Münster, will make the natural, political and material dimension of images and audio-video sequences perceptible in the exhibition at Pariser Platz. Between steel barriers and walls reminiscent of crisis areas, films of humanoid robots address current questions about the role of computer technologies in war.

With the kind support of Kreissparkasse Köln, sponsor of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne. The laudatory speech will be given by Florian Ebner, who curated the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, where Steyerl's video installation Factory of the Sun was also shown.