Akademie der Künste

Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019. Hito Steyerl
21 February - 14 April 2019

By awarding the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019 to Hito Steyerl, the Akademie der Künste is honouring an international artist who is particularly interested in the media, technology and the dissemination of images. Her discourse revolves around several socio-political processes: in a diverse panoply of media, Steyerl visualises postcolonial critique, abuse of power, violence, feminist representation logic and the influences of globalisation on the financial, labour, and commodities markets. The jury consists of Akademie members Douglas Gordon, Katharina Grosse and Ulrike Lorenz.

On the occasion of awarding the prize, the Akademie der Künste is, among other things, showing Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016), a room-filling installation made of steel dividers and walls with compiled audio-video sequences of humanoid robots. Here, Steyerl concretises the question as to how virtual realities influence users and recipients in regard to the role of computer technologies in war situations. The 2-channel video work Abstract (2012) juxtaposes a military conflict in a Kurdish-populated region of Eastern Turkey with mobile phone footage the artist recorded on Pariser Platz. The prize winner will also be screening her filmic study Empty Centre (1998) on an LED wall. The montage contrasts visions of the future from passers-by for the wasteland between the Reichstag building and Potsdamer Platz using almost forgotten documentary images filmed before its reconstruction. Her video works Normality 6 (1999) and Babenhausen (1997) will also be shown.

Hito Steyerl (born in 1966 in Munich) is a Professor of Experimental Film and Video, as well as a co-founder of the Research Center for Proxy Politics at Berlin University of the Arts. She studied cinematography and documentary film direction in Tokyo and Munich. In 2003, she completed her doctorate in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her works have been exhibited at the Biennale in Venice, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, among others. In addition to her work as an artist, she has also worked at the Center for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and as a guest professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. The Royal College of Art, London awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2016.

The Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis, which the Akademie der Künste awards to a visual artist on an annual basis, has a value of EUR 12,000. Previous winners include Adrian Piper (2018), Katharina Sievering (2017), Edmund Kuppel (2016), Bernard Frize (2015) and Corinne Wasmuht (2014). The prize and the accompanying exhibition and publication are co-financed by Kreissparkasse Cologne, sponsor of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne.

A publication will accompany the exhibition. With the kind support of Kreissparkasse Cologne, sponsor of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne.