Art Gallery of Ontario
October 24, 2019–February 23, 2020

By Jill Glessing

Artist and cultural critic Hito Steyerl, widely recognized for her writing and video works, explores the mostly invisible relations among contemporary art, networked digital technology, and the power structures that aim to control them. In her exhibition This is the future at the Art Gallery of Ontario, eleven works – all video installations but for one – offer a tour through her development, from her earliest single-channel videos to later installations that engage sophisticated techniques and ideas. Montage is Steyerl’s principle strategy: the playful, sometimes dazzling, collisions among pop-culture imagery, dance beats, and eclectic scholarship and phi-losophy belie her dead-serious concerns – domination and exploitation by political and economic powers. The formal and thematic oppositions developed within both individual and paired works signal Steyerl’s embrace of a central feature of contemporary life, contradiction; her investigations into hegemonic realms are always countered by restorative processes of resistance…

 

See the magazine for the complete article and more images: Ciel variable 115 – THE MARCH OF THE WORLD