Presented for the first time in Southeast Asia, immerse yourself in the critically acclaimed video installation by renowned German artist Hito Steyerl that probes the endless circulation of information (and misinformation) in our digital landscape today.
Singapore Art Museum presents the Southeast Asia premiere of Hito Steyerl’s landmark video installation Factory of the Sun. Through the installation, Steyerl explores how the endless circulation of images in contemporary media influences our reality. On screen, the distinctions between truth and fiction dissolve in a montage of YouTube dance videos, drone surveillance footage, video games, fictitious news segments and documentation of student uprisings. This alternate reality extends beyond the screen, immersing viewers in a glowing grid that connects the physical gallery to the virtual world of the film.
Factory of the Sun debuted at the German Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennale.
------------------
Image credit: Courtesy the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul
Steyerl's video tells a story of workers who are forced to dance to produce artificial sunshine.
Download the step-by-step guide here to try the above dance yourself!
Hito Steyerl (b. 1966) is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her prolific practice occupies a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have increasingly addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals, often online.
She studied Documentary Film Directing at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image and at the HFF – University of Television and Film in Munich. She subsequently studied Philosophy at the Academy of the Arts in Vienna, where she received her doctorate.
She is Professor for Experimental Film and Video at the UdK – University of the Arts, Berlin, where she founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
Moving through the semiotic layers of Steyerl’s work, this essay investigates Factory of the Sun by focusing on the central narrative of the eponymous video game, the on-screen framing devices and the artwork’s gallery presentation, to question the place of the viewer as a political subject within this mediated reality.
In the landmark video installation, Factory of the Sun, Hito Steyerl explores how the endless circulation of images in contemporary media influences our reality. On screen, the distinctions between truth and fiction dissolve in a montage of YouTube dance videos, drone surveillance footage, video games, fictitious news segments and documentation of student uprisings. This alternate reality extends beyond the screen, immersing viewers in a glowing grid that connects the physical gallery to the virtual world of the film.
Factory of the Sun debuted at the German Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennale.
