News — Dec 9, 2014

With the support of the Mondriaan Foundation, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Van Abbemuseum have jointly purchased four works by the German artist, writer, filmmaker and performer Hito Steyerl for their collection. These are the video installation Adorno’s Grey(2012) and the video trilogy November (2004), Lovely Andrea (2007) and Abstract (2012).

Hito Steyerl (born 1966) is considered to be one of today’s most distinctive artistic personalities. Her importance in contemporary art concerns both the themes which she addresses and the special way in which she combines different disciplines (documentary film, video art, performance, writing, and theoretical research). In her work Steyerl speculates about critical contemporary themes such as the influence of the internet and digitalization on everyday life. She is currently emerging as an international figure as an artist with exhibitions in institutions such as the Artists Space in New York and the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and with purchases by MoMA New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, amongst other museums. With the exception of the video How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV file (Van Abbemuseum, 2013), Steyerl’s work has up to now not been included in other Dutch public collections.

Steyerl’s most important themes and her special way of working are clearly apparent in the four works purchased by the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Abbemuseum. The selection took into account the way in which the works fit into the collections of the two museums. 

With the exception of Abstract, these works were exhibited in the retrospective exhibition 
of Hito Steyerl’s work organized by the Van Abbemuseum earlier this year. In recent years both the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Abbemuseum have regularly worked together with Steyerl – the Stedelijk with various performances: I Dreamed a Dream (Part 1), May 2013, Is the Museum a Battlefield? commissioned by the Stedelijk during the 2013 Istanbul Biennale and The Secret Museum, November 2014. Recently her work has also been included in the exhibition Bad Thoughts – The Martijn and Jeannette Sanders Collection.

Collaboration between the Stedelijk and the Van Abbemuseum

In addition to Steyerl’s works the Stedelijk and the Van Abbemuseum also jointly own a work by Yael Bartana and two works by Wendelien van Oldenborgh. In the future the museums would like to extend their cooperation. For example, a cooperative project has been established with De Hallen Haarlem and LIMA in Amsterdam with the aim of increasing the visibility of media art.

This purchase is supported by the Mondriaan Foundation. The foundation considers that these works are a good acquisition for the Netherlands Collection and sees the cooperative venture as an extremely valuable initiative. It is not only the costs that can be shared in these sorts of cooperative ventures, but important works can also be made available to a larger general public. Furthermore, by being presented in different museum contexts, the works can benefit from increased significance and interpretation.

More about the works that were purchased

November (2004) and Lovely Andrea (2007) are based on the type of documentary on which Steyerl casts doubt as an adequate form of telling stories. In November images of her deceased childhood friend Andrea Wolf as an actress in a feminist fight film are juxtaposed with a photograph of Wolf which is carried along in a Kurdish protest as an icon for the Kurdish struggle for freedom. Lovely Andrea shows Steyerl’s search in Tokyo for a bondage photograph which she had posed for twenty years before. In the final part of the trilogy, Abstract (2012), Steyerl links the Kurdish struggle with a countershot of a building of a German firm that manufactures rockets.

The video installation Adorno’s Grey (2012) shows the vain search of restorers for the gray layer which the German philosopher Theodor Adorno allegedly had painted on the walls of his lecture hall in order to increase the concentration of his students. The search is continued in the installation itself in the interaction between the gradations of gray in the paint on the panels and the projected gray shades of the black and white projection. In this way Steyerl helps us to see and feel that every reality is also a projection through the viewer’s eyes.

The purchase of the works by Hito Steyerl is supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.