“Film as essayistic collage is central to Steyerl’s works. She combines her own recordings with scenes from Hollywood movies and documentary material in various works, operating within different rhythms and time intervals. Her films criticize an understanding of the documentary image as a bearer of history and authenticity and as an object of empathy and identification.In a time where imagery travels, is being reinterpreted, used and distributed more quickly than ever before, the image as document has lost its apparent authority as a witness.”

Introduction by Tone Hansen. Essays by Pablo Lafuente, Hito Steyerl and Maria Muhle.

Hito Steyerl is rightly considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion.

Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from the past ten years. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills. This publication is a charged slideshow of the artist’s extraordinary investigations into the status, circulation, and materiality of images.

Copublished with Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Design by Bardhi Haliti.

With a foreword by Franco ”Bifo” Berardi.

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.

e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle. Design by Jeff Ramsey, cover artwork by Liam Gillick

Rereading Appropriation reconsiders the artistic strategy of appropriation through later elaborated theories of affect, to explore how an understanding of ‘reciprocal investment’ reconfigures appropriation as an act that is based in connecting, acknowledging and being porous to material. Rereading Appropriation compiles texts read in the sister reading groups of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution during its Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication (2013–2014).