[012]
Mission Accomplished: Belanciege
Collaboration
politics
Trafó Gallery, photo by Dávid Biró
Hito Steyerl "Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE" is part of the exhibition "… of bread, wine, cars, security and peace". The point of departure for the three-channel video installation is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and how this historical event paved the way for commodification and privatization. The artists turn to the field of fashion, using the luxury brand Balenciaga as an example to reflect on political and cultural changes in the period of the last thirty years. The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at Trafó Gallery reveals similar ’invasions’ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
The video installation is co-created by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl and Miloš Trakilović and is based on their lecture in 2019 at n.b.k. - Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Almost 30 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lecture reflects on post-1989 transformations and political rearrangements in the former Soviet territories, sheds light on the interconnections between culture and populism, and examines in a broader context the mechanisms of oligarchic-capitalist culture that emerged during the 'privatisation' of the former Eastern bloc.
20.08.25
[057]
The Wretched of the Screen
Individual
politics
In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
“Images are no longer passive reflections; they are active agents, manipulated and distorted by the flows of capital and power, reshaping reality in their own fractured, pixelated image.”
20.08.25