Duty-Free Art

Hito Steyerl

A view from the outside of the Sumer Park Kültür Merkezi, Diyarbakir, Turkey. Photo: Hito Steyerl.

Chapter 1: The National Museum The French Louvre is listed as a partner in developing this plan.4 Both the Louvre and This is a file published in 2012 by WikiLeaks. the Guggenheim Bilbao are named as role It forms part of WikiLeaks’s files models for a redesigned National Museum database.1 The file is called “316787_Vision in . Presentation—Oct 30 2010 Eng.pptx,” in PowerPoint format, dated October 2010.2 A conference is planned to unveil the win- It details Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad’s ner of an international competition for the plans for the future of Syria’s museums. Her design of this National Museum in April foundation aims to establish a network of 2011. museums to promote Syria’s economic and social development and strengthen national 3 identity and cultural pride. Cultural Landscapes 2011, a new annual forum, will bring together an international assembly of thought leaders and experts from the worlds of heritage, contemporary culture, 1 ://wikileaks.org/syria-files/ academia and business. This inaugural edition will take the 2 The PowerPoint file is attached to an sent to Syrian experience as a starting point for a discussion global the Ministry of Presidential Affairs with the subject line in reach and conclusion,” Feb. 7, 2011, Email-ID 765252 (see “Presentation on the New Vision for the Syrian Museums attachment entitled “About Cultural Landscapes”) and Heritage Sites,” Oct. 30, 2010, Email-ID 2089122 4 However, on June 26, 2011, partner museums call for 3 In the foundation’s own words: “Under the patronage of a dismantling of the initiative’s institutional framework, the The First Lady, Asma Al-Assad, the Syrian Government is Syria Heritage Foundation. Earlier that month, the Financial launching a cultural initiative of exceptional ambition—the Times reported that the organization had suspended opera- transformation of its museums and the conservation of tions. See Lina Saigol, “First lady struggles to live up its heritage sites. To celebrate and inform this initiative, to promises,” Financial Times, June 9, 2011

1 / 21 However, three weeks prior to this date, In September 2014, this museum became a twenty protesters were “reportedly killed refugee camp. It did not represent a nation, as 100,000 people marched in the city of but instead sheltered people fleeing from Daraa.”5 By then, invitations for the confer- national disintegrations. ence had already been issued to a host of prominent speakers, including the directors After the Islamic State (IS) militia crossed of the Louvre and the British Museum. On and effectively abolished parts of the border April 28, 2011, Art Newspaper reports that between Syria and Iraq in August 2014,9 the conference has been cancelled due to between fifty thousand and one hundred street protests.6 The winner of the architec- thousand Yezidi refugees escaped the tural competition for the National Museum region of Shengal in northern Iraq. Most has never been announced. of them had trekked on foot across Mt. Shengal, assisted by Kurdish rebel groups, who had opened a safety corridor. While Chapter 2: Never Again the majority stayed in refugee camps in Rojava, northern Syria, and several camps To build a nation, Benedict Anderson sug- in northern Iraq, many refugees crossed into gested that there should be print capitalism7 Turkey’s Kurdish regions, where they were and a museum to narrate a nation’s history welcomed with amazing hospitality. The city and design its identity.8 Today—instead of of Diyarbakir opened its municipal gallery print—there is data capitalism and a lot of as an emergency shelter. museums. To build a museum, a nation is not necessary. But if nations are a way to Once settled on mats within the gallery organize time and space, so is the museum. space, many refugees started asking for And as times and spaces change, so do SIM cards to try to reach missing family museum spaces. members by cell phone.

The image above shows the municipal This is the desk of the curator, left empty.10 art gallery of Diyarbakir in Turkey. From June to September 2014, it hosts a show on genocide and its consequences, called Chapter 3: Conditions of Possibility “Never Again! Apology and Coming to Terms with the Past.” Its poster shows According to the Google N-gram viewer,11 former prime minister of West Germany the usage of the word “impossible” has Willy Brandt on his knees in front of the steeply dropped since around the mid-twen- Warsaw ghetto memorial. tieth century. But what does this tell us?

9 The exodus of Yazidis from Shengal is described in Liz Sly, 5 Peter Aspden, “The walls of ignorance,” Financial Times, “Exodus from the mountain: Yazidis flood into Iraq following June 9, 2012 U.S. airstrikes,” Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2014 6 Anna Somers Cocks, “Syria turmoil kills Mrs Al-Assad’s 10 His name is Baris Seyitvan. forum,” The Art Newspaper, Apr. 28, 2011 11 Wikipedia: “The Google ‘Ngram’ Viewer is an online 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections viewer, initially based on Google Books, that charts frequen- on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and extend- cies of any word or short sentence using yearly count of ed ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 224. n- found in the sources printed since 1800 up to 2012 8 Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum,” excerpt from in any of the following eight languages: American English, Imagined Communities, available at http://www.haussite.net/ British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, haus.0/SCRIPT/txt2001/01/a_censu.HTML and Chinese”

2 / 21 Sumer Park Kültür Merkezi, Diyarbakir, Turkey. Photo: Hito Steyerl.

Does it mean that fewer and fewer things To paraphrase philosopher Peter Osborne’s are impossible? Does this mean that im- illuminating insights on this topic: contem- possibility “as such” is in historical decline? porary art shows us the lack of a (global) Perhaps it just means that the conditions time and space. Moreover, it projects a for possibilities as such are subject to fictional unity onto a variety of different change over time? Are both the possible ideas of time and space, thus providing a and the impossible defined by historical common surface where there is none.12 and external conditions? Contemporary art thus becomes a proxy According to Immanuel Kant, time and for the global commons, for the lack of any space are necessary conditions to perceive common ground, temporality, or space. or understand anything. Without time and space, knowledge, experience, and It is defined by a proliferation of locations, vision cannot unfold. Kant calls this per- and a lack of accountability. It works by way spective “criticism.” With this in mind, of major real estate operations transforming what kind of time and space is necessary cities worldwide as they reorganize urban for contemporary art to become manifest? space. It is even a space of civil wars that Or rather: What does criticism about trigger art market booms a decade or so contemporary art say about time and later through the redistribution of wealth space today? by warfare. It takes place on servers and by means of fiber optic infrastructure, and To brutally summarize a lot of scholarly whenever public debt miraculously trans- texts: contemporary art is made possible forms into private wealth. Contemporary by neoliberal capital plus the internet,bienni- art happens when taxpayers are deluded als, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, grow- ing income inequality. Let’s add asymmetric 12 Osborne argues that contemporary art expresses the warfare—as one of the reasons for the vast “disjunctive unity of present times … As a historical concept, redistribution of wealth—real estate specu- the contemporary thus involves a projection of unity onto lation, tax evasion, money laundering, and the differential totality of the times of human lives …” Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of deregulated financial markets to this list. Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 22.

3 / 21 Google books’ N-gram viewer tracks the word “impossible” in all the books on its database printed in between the years 1800-2000.

into believing they are bailing out other other floors are set outside the freeport sovereign states when in fact they are zone. A new art storage space was opened subsidizing international banks that thus last year. Up until only a few years ago, the get compensated for pushing high-risk debt freeport wasn’t even officially considered onto vulnerable nations.13 Or when this or part of Switzerland. that regime decides it needs the PR equiva- lent of a nip and tuck procedure. This building is rumored to house thou- sands of Picassos, but no one knows an But contemporary art also creates new exact number since documentation is rather physical spaces that bypass national sover- opaque. There is little doubt though that its eignty. contents could compete with any very large museum.14 Let me give you a contemporary example: freeport art storage. Let’s assume that this is one of the most important art spaces in the world right now. This is the mother of all freeport art storage It is not only not public, but it is also sitting spaces: Geneva freeport, a tax-free zone in inside a very interesting geography. Geneva that includes parts of an old freight station and an industrial storage building. From a legal standpoint, freeport art storage The free-trade zone takes up the backyard spaces are somewhat extraterritorial. Some and the fourth floor of the old storage are located in the transit zones of airports or building, so that different jurisdictions run in tax-free zones. Keller Easterling describes through one and the same building, as the the free zone as a “fenced enclave for ware- housing.”15 It has now become a primary 13 As in the case of the relation between Germany (or EU-taxpayers) and Greece. Eighty-nine percent of the so- called bailout funds have gone to international banks. Only 14 “Suffice it to say, there is wide belief among art dealers, the remaining 11 percent has reached the Greek national advisers and insurers that there is enough art tucked away budget. Even if only a fraction of this money ends up at here to create one of the world’s great museums.” David auction, how would auctions nowadays fare without the Segal, “Swiss Freeports Are Home for a Growing Treasury of constant subsidies from public funds that mysteriously end Art,” New York Times, July 21, 2012 up as private assets? 15 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of

4 / 21 organ of global urbanism copied and instability” to describe the aerodynamic pasted to locations worldwide. It is properties of fighter jets that gain decisive an example of “extrastatecraft,” as advantages by navigating at the brink of Easterling terms it, within a “mongrel system failure.18 They would more or less form of exception” beyond the laws of “fall” or “fail” in the desired direction. the nation-state. In this deregulatory This constructive instability is implemented state of exemption, corporations are within nation-states by incorporating privileged at the expense of common zones where they “fail” on purpose. citizens, “investors” replace taxpayers, Switzerland, for example, contains “245 and modules supplant buildings: open customs warehouses,”19 enclosing zones of legal and administrative exception. [Freeports’] attractions are similar to those Are this state and others a container for offered by offshore financial centres: security different types of jurisdictions that get and confidentiality, not much scrutiny … applied, or rather do not get applied, in and an array of tax advantages … Goods relation to the wealth of corporations or in freeports are technically in transit, even individuals? Does this kind of state become if in reality the ports are used more and a package for opportunistic statelessness? more as permanent homes for accumulated As Elsaesser pointed out, his whole idea wealth.16 of “constructive instability” originated with a discussion of Swiss artists Fischli and The freeport is thus a zone for permanent Weiss’s work Der Lauf der Dinge (1987). transit. Here all sorts of things are knocked off balance in celebratory collapse. The film’s Although it is fixed, does the freeport also glorious motto is: “Am schönsten ist das define perpetual ephemerality? Is it simply Gleichgewicht, kurz bevor’s zusammen- an extraterritorial zone, or is it also a rogue bricht” (Balance is most beautiful just at sector carefully settled for financial profit- the point when it is about to collapse). ability17? Among many other things, freeports also The freeport contains multiple contradic- become a zone for duty-free art, a zone tions: it is a zone of terminal impermanence; where control and failure are calibrated it is also a zone of legalized extralegality according to “constructive instability” so maintained by nation-states trying to emu- that things cheerfully hang in a permanently late failed states as closely as possible by frozen failing balance. selectively losing control. Thomas Elsaesser once used the term “constructive

18 Thomas Elsaesser, “‘Constructive instability’, or: The life of things as the cinema’s afterlife?” 2008, 19f. Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014). The texts manifold implications for contemorary political 16 “Freeports: Über-warehouses for the ultra-rich,” thought and its relation to managed collapse cannot be The Economist, Nov. 23, 2013 underestimated, in relation to its discussion of technology 17 Marie Maurisse, “La «caverne d’Ali Baba» de Genève, but also political usage: “Its engineering provenance has plus grand port franc du monde, ignore la crise,” Le Figaro, been overlaid by a neo-con political usage, for instance, Sept. 20, 2014: “Selon un document confidentiel, le port by Condoleezza Rice when she called the deaths among franc de Genève dans son ensemble générerait chaque the civilian population and the resulting chaos during the année pas moins de 300 millions de francs de retombées Lebanon-Israel war in the summer of 2006 the consequence économiques sur le canton“ (According to a confidential of ‘constructive instability’” document, Geneva freeport in total would generate no less 19 Cynthia O’Murchu, “Swiss businessman arrested in than 300 million Swiss francs of revenue for the canton). art market probe,” Financial Times, Feb. 26, 2015

5 / 21 Geneva Freeport signage alerts visitors to its guard dogs. Photo: Hito Steyerl.

Trezor is a digital wallet for bitcoin transactions. Image: CC by-SA 3.0

6 / 21 Chapter 4: Duty-Free Art the entire lobby. Paintings that line the exposed concrete walls lend the facility Huge art storage spaces are being created the air of a gallery. Private rooms and worldwide in what could essentially be vaults, barricaded by seven-ton doors, called a luxury no man’s land, tax havens line the corridors. Near the lobby, private where artworks are shuffled around from galleries give collectors a chance to view one storage room to another once they get or show potential buyers their art under traded. This is also one of the prime spaces museum-quality spotlights. A planned for contemporary art: an offshore or extra- second phase will double the size of the territorial museum. In September 2014, facility to 538,000 square feet. Collectors Luxembourg opened its own freeport. The are picked up by FreePort staff at their country is not alone in trying to replicate the plane and whisked by limousine, any time success of the Geneva freeport: “A freeport of day or night, to the facility. If the client that opened at Changi Airport in Singapore is packing valuables, an armed escort will in 2010 is already close to full. Monaco has be provided.21 one, too. A planned ‘freeport of culture’ in Beijing would be the world’s largest art- The title “Cage Without Borders” has a storage facility.”20 A major player in setting double meaning. It not only means that the up many of these facilities is the art han- cage has no limits, but also that the prison dling company Natural Le Coultre, run by is now everywhere, in an extrastatecraft art Swiss national Yves Bouvier. withdrawal facility that seeps through the cracks of national sovereignty and establish- Freeport art storage facilities are secret es its own logistic network. In this ubiqui- museums. tous prison, rules still apply, though it might be difficult to specify exactly which ones, Their spatial conditions are reflected in to whom or what they apply, and how they their designs. are implemented. Whatever they are, their grip seems to considerably loosen in inverse In contrast to the rather perfunctory Swiss proportion to the value of the assets in facility, designers stepped up their game at question. But this construction is not only the freeport art storage facility in Singapore: a device realized in one particular location in 3-D space. It is also basically a stack of Designed by Swiss architects, Swiss juridical, logistical, economic, and data- engineers and Swiss security experts, the based operations, a pile of platforms medi- 270,000-square-foot facility is part bunker, ating between clouds and users via state part gallery. Unlike the free-port facilities laws, communication protocols, corporate in Switzerland, which are staid yet secure standards, etc., that interconnect not only warehouses, the Singapore FreePort sought via fiber-optic connections but aviation to combine security and style. The lobby, routes as well.22 showrooms and furniture were designed by contemporary designers Ron Arad and 21 Cris Prystay, “Singapore Bling,” Wall Street Journal, Johanna Grawunder. A gigantic arcing May 21, 2010 22 Benjamin Bratton, “On the Nomos of the Cloud: The sculpture by Mr. Arad, titled “Cage sans Stack, Deep Address, Integral Geography,” Nov. 2011: “The Frontières,” (Cage Without Borders) spans Stack, the megastructure, can be understood as a conflu- ence of interoperable standards-based complex materi- al-information system of systems, organized according to a 20 “Freeports,” The Economist. vertical section, topographic model of layers and protocols.

7 / 21 Containers in the yard of Natural Le Coultre, Ports Francs, Geneve. Photo: Hito Steyerl.

Freeport art storage is to this “stack” as Think of the artworks and their movement. the national museum traditionally was to the They travel inside a network of tax-free nation. It sits in between countries in pock- zones and also inside the storage spaces ets of superimposing sovereignties where themselves. Perhaps as they do, they do not national jurisdiction has either voluntarily ever get uncrated. They move from one retreated or been demolished. If biennials, storage room to the next without being art fairs, 3-D renderings of gentrified real seen. They stay inside boxes and travel estate, starchitect museums decorating outside national territories with a minimum various regimes, etc., are the corporate of tracking or registration, like insurgents, surfaces of these areas, the secret muse- drugs, derivative financial products, and ums are their dark web, their into other so-called investment vehicles. For all which things disappear, as into an abyss of we know, the crates could even be empty. withdrawal.23 It is a museum of the internet era, but a museum of the dark net, where movement is obscured and data-space is clouded. The Stack is a standardized universal section. The Stack, as we encounter it and as I prototype it, is composed equally of social, human and ‘analog’ layers (chthonic energy Movements of a very different kind are sources, gestures, affects, user-actants, interfaces, cities detailed in WikiLeaks’s Syria files. and streets, rooms and buildings, organic and inorganic envelopes) and informational, non-human computational and ‘digital’ layers (multiplexed fiber optic cables, datacen- —– Original Message —– ters, databases, data standards and protocols, urban-scale networks, embedded systems, universal addressing tables). From: [email protected] Its hard and soft systems intermingle and swap phase states, To: [email protected] some becoming ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ according to occult con- Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2010 4:06 PM ditions. (Serres, hard soft). As a social cybernetics, The Stack that we know and design composes both equilibrium and Subject: Fw: Flight itenary OMA staff emergence, one oscillating into the other in indecipherable ***AMENDMENT***** and unaccountable rhythm, territorializing and de-territorializ- ing the same component for diagonal purposes” 23 An extremely intelligent remark from an audience mem- Dear Mr. Azzam, ber in Moscow added that this was to be seen as a huge benefit, as a lot of shoddy “market art” would get safely This is to confirm the arrival of Mr. Rem quarantined without anyone having to see it. I sympathize very much with her point of view. Koolhaas and his personal assistant Mr.

8 / 21 Stephan Petermann on this coming Monday Assad’s aides and advisers were accessed. July 12th. We need visa for them as we Apparently, some used the same password: spoke before (both are Dutch). Their pass- “12345.”28 The leaked included port photos are attached. They are arriving correspondence—mostly through intermedi- separately and at different times. Mr. aries—between Mansour Azzam, the Koolhaas coming from China through Dubai Minister of Presidential Affairs, and the on Emirates airlines (arriving in Damascus at studios of Rem Koolhaas (OMA), Richard 4:25 PM), while Mr. Stephan Petermann is Rogers, and Herzog and de Meuron regard- coming from Vienna on Austrian airlines ing various issues.29 To paraphrase the (arriving in Damascus before Mr. Koolhaas content of some emails: Rogers and at 3:00 PM). Koolhaas were being invited to speak in Damascus and, with Koolhaas, these visits They are staying at the Art House or at the extended to project discussions including Four Seasons hotel until their departure on the National Parliament.30 Herzog de Thursday (at 4:00 pm).24 Meuron offered a complimentary concept design proposal for the Al-Assad House for WikiLeaks’s Syria database comprises Culture in Aleppo, and expressed interest in around 2.5 million emails from 680 do- the selection process for the parliament mains, yet the authenticity of these docu- project.31 A lot of this correspondence is ments was not verified by WikiLeaks. It can really just gossip about the studios by way be verified, however, that the PR company of intermediaries. There is also lots of spam. Brown Lloyd James was involved in trying No communication with any of the studios to enhance the image of the Assad family.25 is documented after the end of November In early 2011, shortly before the start of the 2010. With protests starting in January , a Vogue story, presciently 2011, a full-blown uprising began in Syria photographed by war photographer James by the end of March of that year. All conver- Nachtwey, portrays Asma al-Assad as the sations and negotiations between officials “Rose of the Desert,” a modernizer and and architects seem to have stopped as patron of culture.26 scrutiny of the Assad regime increased in the buildup to actual hostilities. The authen- In February 2012, one year into the war, ticity of none of these documents32 could be and affiliated organizations confirmed independently, so for the time hacked into the email server of the Syrian being, their status is that of unmoored sets Ministry of Presidential Affairs, in solidarity of data, which may or may not have with Syrian bloggers, protesters, and activ- ists.27 The inboxes of seventy-eight of took action. Assisting bloggers, protesters and activists in avoiding surveillance, disseminating media, interfering with regime communications and networks, monitoring the 24 https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2089311_urgent. Syrian internet for disruptions or attempts at surveillance— html and waging a relentless information and psychological 25 Bill Carter and Amy Chozick,“Syria’s Assads Turned to campaign against Assad and his murderous and genocidal West for Glossy P.R.,” New York Times, June 10, 2012 government” 26 The story has since been withdrawn. More background 28 Barak Ravid, “Bashar Assad emails leaked, tips for ABC can be found here: Max Fisher, “The Only Remaining Online interview revealed,” Haaretz, Feb. 7, 2012 Copy of Vogue’s Asma al-Assad Profile,” The Atlantic, Jan. 3, 29 https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/ 2012 30 https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs//2104601_import- 27 Michael Stone, “Anonymous supplies WikiLeaks with ant-follow-up.html ‘Syria files,’” The Examiner, July 9, 2012. This article quotes 31 https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2094815_fwd-al- Anonymous’ initial declaration: “While the United Nations asad-house-for-culture-in-aleppo.html sat back and theorized on the situation in Syria, Anonymous 32 https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/

9 / 21 Artist Saif al-Islam Gaddafi stands beside his painting War (2001), which depicts NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

anything to do with their presumed authors fell from the sky, which came up against and receivers 33. But they most definitely a stream of blood.”35 are sets of data, hosted by WikiLeaks serv- ers that can be described in terms of their Saif al-Islam said in a statement at the circulation regardless of presumed prove- time: “Not only do we buy weapons and nance and authorship.34 sell gas and oil, but we have culture, art and history.”36 Above is Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s painting, War (2001). Saif is the son of the late head In September 2010, OMA expresses the of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi and was a desire to work in Syria.37 A subsequent political figure in Libya prior to his father’s email from Sinan Ali Hassan—a local archi- deposition by rebel forces backed by NATO tect who acts as an intermediary—to airstrikes in 2011. This painting was exhibit- Mansour Azzam flaunts the advantages of ed as part of a show called “The Desert is such a collaboration: “Rem was the previ- not Silent” in London in 2002. ous supervisor and boss of Zaha Hadid in addition to the fact that he is considered to War depicts NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. 35 Martin Bailey,“Gaddafi’s son reveals true colours,” The Art Newspaper, March 2, 2011 The artist writes: “A civil war broke out in 36 Stephanie Nebehay and Vincent Fribault, “Gaddafi son Kosovo, which shattered the picture and used his paintings to promote Libyan culture,” Reuters, Oct. 28, 2011 its theme. The sea unleashed itself, anger 37 “Rem Koolhaas is very keen to visit Damascus with strong interest to participate in public sector and urban gentrification and regeneration of the city, and trying to keep away from commercial developments and suburban 33 Studio Herzog de Meuron has been contacted for com- master plans, yet we wanted to sense and feel the current ment but has not replied as of the time of publication. For conditions of architectural and urbanization in the city before the answer from Rem Koolhaas’s studio, OMA, see below. establishing any commitment . I also wanted to engage 34 https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2104601_import- Rem in Damascus architectural school and establish intern- ant-follow-up.html ship program with OMA and the university.”

10 / 21 be more important (if not much more im- portant) than Lord Richard Rogers, in terms of celebrity and professional status.”38

From the conversation between OMA and Sinan Ali Hassan, it becomes clear that OMA’s proposal might be based on a project realized in Libya previously: “This would be a similar scope to the Libyan Sahara vision we showed you, and the one that Rem discussed with the President.”39

In an interview in June 2010, Koolhaas states that people close to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi approached him.40 At the time, he is widely seen as a reformer. OMA’s project in Libya revolves around preserva- tion and is exhibited at the Venice 41 Biennale. The project is later mentioned Here, a genealogy of contemporary art is represented as a possible precedent for a project diagrammatically by philosopher Peter Osborne. proposal for the desert region around Palmyra, Syria. Since the uprising in early 2011, this area has been deeply affected by the ensuing civil war.

At present, the International Criminal Chapter 5: A Dream court has requested Saif Gaddafi’s extra- dition from Libya, where he remains WARNING: THIS IS THE ONLY FICTIONAL imprisoned.42 CHAPTER IN THIS TALK

To come back to the original question: What happened to time and space? Why are they broken and disjointed? Why is space shat- tered into container-like franchising modules, dark webs, civil wars, and tax havens repli- cating all over the world? 38 Ibid 39 Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. See the full email here: https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2091860_ With these thoughts in mind, I fell asleep fwd-.html and started dreaming … and my dream was 40 Suzie Rushton, “The shape of things to come: Rem Koolhaas’s striking designs,” The Independent, pretty strange. I dreamt about some dia- June 21, 2010. “An unlikely new client is Libya, specifically grams in one of Peter Osborne’s recent texts. ‘a subtle group of people around the [Gaddafi] son there who want to pull the country toward Europe’” 41 OMA’s exhibition at the 2010 Venice Biennale, entitled They describe a genealogy of contemporary CRONOCAOS, included a section on the Libyan desert. The art; I wasn’t focusing on their content, but in- exhibition was based around “critical preservation stories” stead on their form. The first thing I noticed 42 A warrant for Saif Gaddafi’s arrest was issued by the ICC on June 27, 2011 was that the succession of concentric circles

11 / 21 seemed to indicate a dent, or a dimple, in Behind his astronaut’s visor, Peter croaked: any case, a 3-D cavity. But why would time and space start sagging, so to speak? Could there be an issue with gravity? Maybe a mi- cro–black hole could cause these circles to curve? But then again, it is much more likely that something else caused this dimple.

Suddenly, I found the answer to the ques- tion. I started losing gravity and flying up towards space. Peter Osborne was floating around there too, and with an unlikely Texas accent, he pointed down and showed me this sight. This is the role of contemporary art. It is a proxy, a stand-in. It is projected onto a site of impact, after time and space have been shattered into a disjunctive unity—and pro- ceed to collapse into rainbow-colored stacks designed by starchitects.

Contemporary art is a kind of layer or proxy which pretends that everything is still ok, while people are reeling from the effects of shock policies, shock and awe campaigns, reality TV, power cuts, any other form of cuts, cat GIFs, tear gas—all of which are all completely dismantling and rewiring the sensory apparatus and potentially also hu- man faculties of reasoning and understand- Crosshairs aiming at a target. ing by causing a state of shock and confu- sion, of permanent hyperactive depression. Seen from above, Peter’s diagram trans- formed into a sight. You don’t know what’s going on behind the doors of the freeport storage rooms either, If you look at it from above, the slight cavity do you? Let me tell you what’s happening vanishes. It becomes a flat screen. From in there: time and space are smashed and here on, people just ended up seeing the rearranged into little pieces like in a freak genealogy of contemporary art in Peter’s particle accelerator, and the result is the diagrams instead of a depression indicating cage without borders called contemporary that the target had been hit already and that art today. a gaping crater had opened at the site of impact. —AND THIS IS WHERE THE FICTIONAL PART ABRUPTLY ENDS— Seen from above, the genealogy of contem- porary art was acting as a proxy or a screen: I woke in shock and found myself reading a sight to cover the site of impact. this .pdf document aloud.

12 / 21 13 / 21 Chapter 6: And Now to Justin Bieber dumped coordinates of alleged members onto the dark web.45 This is the feed of E! Online on May 4, 2013, which has someone posing The data-space of Syria is embattled, as Bieber triumphantly blurting out: hacked, fragmented. Moreover, it extends “I’m a gay.” from the AP to Wall Street to Russian and Australian servers, as well as to the Twitter accounts of a celebrity magazine.

It extends to WikiLeaks’s servers, where the Syria files are hosted, and which had to move around quite a lot previously, being ousted from Amazon in 2010.

It was once rumored that WikiLeaks tried to move its servers to an offshore location, an exterritorial former oil platform called As you can see, the Syrian Electronic Army Sealand.46 This would in fact have replicated (SEA) has hacked the Twitter account. the freeport scenario from a different angle.

Who is the SEA? It is a group of pro-Assad But to ask a more general question: How regime hackers. They also hacked Le Monde does the internet, or more precisely net- in France a few weeks ago. Previously, the worked operations between different data- SEA had commandeered: the websites of bases, affect the physical construction of , the Washington Post, museums—or the impossibility thereof? and the recruitment division of the US Marine Corps. The group also hacked the Twitter feed of the and Chapter 7: An Email Sent From sent out a false report about a bombing at Switzerland and its Reply the White House.43 From: Hito Steyerl mailto:[email protected] The above diagram shows the consequenc- Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2015 8:05 PM es of this tweet on Wall Street. In three To: Office Reception minutes, the “fake tweet erased $136 billion Subject: Request for confirmation of authen- in equity market value.”44 ticity

Anonymous Syria and its multiple allies had hacked the Syrian Electronic Army and Dear Sirs,

43 Shane Harris, “How Did Syria’s Hacker Army Suddenly I would like to kindly ask you to confirm the Get So Good?,” Foreign Policy, Sept. 4, 2013. For more authenticity of various email communica- details, see this interesting report: John Scott-Railton and tions between OMA/AMO and Syrian Morgan Marquis-Boire, “A Call to Harm: New Malware Attacks Target the ,” CitizenLab.org, June 21, 2013 45 Hunter Stuart, “Syrian Electronic Army Denies Being 44 Max Fisher, “Syrian hackers claim AP hack that tipped Attacked By Anonymous,” Huffington Post Sept. 4, 2013 stock market by $136 billion. Is it terrorism?,” Washington 46 Joshua Keating, “WikiLeaks to move to Sealand?,” Post, April 23, 2013 Foreign Policy, Feb. 1, 2012

14 / 21 government officials and intermediaries CC: Legal , published by Wikileaks as part of their xy “Syria files” in 2012. At 26/02/2015 7:13 am

I am a Berlin-based filmmaker and writer Dear Hito Steyerl, working on a lecture about the transforma- tions of national museums under conditions Thank you for your email. We are not able to of civil war, both in data- and 3D physical confirm the authenticity of the documents space. linked below. However, we wish you good luck with your There is no intent to scandalize the commu- work. nication between OMA and the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs. The intent is Best regards, to ask how both internet communication Jeremy Higginbotham and the (near-) collapse of some nations Head of Public Affairs states affect the planning of contemporary OMA museum spaces. (contact address redacted) In this context it would be interesting to know more about the circumstances that After the leaks, I started led to the end of project discussions in using ProtonMail, an initiative by CERN Syria. I am sure that your office had its researchers, who are graciously providing a reasons for this and it would be great to be free encrypted email platform. This is how able to include these in the discussion. they decribe their project, using the map of Switzerland: Pls find below a list of links I plan on quot- ing. All information on the ProtonMail servers is stored under the jurisdiction of the Cantonal Best regards, Court of Geneva, taking advantage of the Hito Steyerl privacy laws of Switzerland and the Canton. wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2089311_ur- But OMA/AMO’s friendly response is not gent.html stored in a freeport, it is just stored under wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2092135_ “regular” Swiss jurisdiction in a former very-important.html military command center deep inside the wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2091860_fwd-. Swiss alps.47 This is the jurisdiction and html encryption I use to try to make any potential bit.ly/18jZeWr government interference with some of my data just a tiny bit more cumbersome. I am Sent from ProtonMail, encrypted email in fact taking advantage of legal protections based in Switzerland. that have enabled tax evasion and money laundering through Swiss banks and other

RE: Request for confirmation of authenticity From: Jeremy Higginbotham 47 Information under the heading “Swiss Security” on the the ProtonMail website: https://protonmail.ch/pages/ To: Hito Steyerl why-protonmail

15 / 21 facilities on an astounding scale.48 On the Chapter 8: Shooting at Clocks—The Public other hand, the mere usage of privacy-relat- Museum ed web tools flags users for NSA scrutiny, thus effectively reversing its desired effect.49 To build a nation, Benedict Anderson sug- The screen of anonymity turns out to be a gested there should be print capitalism and paradoxical device. a museum. Nowadays, it is not impossible to build a museum without a nation. The ambiguous effect of policies destined to increase anonymity also figures into a We can even look at it more generally and different level of freeport activity. see both nations and museums as just another way to organize time and space, in On February 25, 2015, Monaco prosecutors this case, by smashing them to pieces. arrested Yves Bouvier—the owner of Natural Le Coultre, the company involved with the But aren’t time and space smashed whenev- Luxemburg, Geneva, and Singapore free- er a new paradigm for a museum is creat- ports—for suspected art fraud: “The investi- ed? This indeed happened in France’s July gation is believed to centre on inflating Revolution of 1830, of which Walter prices in very big art transactions in which Benjamin tells a story.51 Revolutionaries Bouvier was an intermediary.”50 Bouvier were shooting at clocks. They had previous- allegedly took advantage of the fact that ly also overturned the calendar, renaming most artworks held in freeports are owned months and changing their duration. by what are called “sociétés écran” (literally “screen companies”). Since transactions And this is the period when the Louvre was were made through these anonymous stormed yet again—as during every major proxies, buyer and seller were not able to Paris uprising in the nineteenth century. The communicate and control the amount of prototype for a public museum was created commission fees charged. The screen that when time and space were smashed and was supposed to provide anonymity for welded anew. The Louvre was created by owners may also have worked against them. being stormed. It was stormed in 1792 Invisibility is a screen that sometimes works during the French Revolution and turned both ways—through not always. It works in from a feudal collection of spoils—a period favor of whoever is controlling the screen. version of freeport art storage spaces—into a public art museum, presumably the first in the world, introducing a model of national culture. Afterwards, it turned into the cultur- al flagship of a colonial empire that tried to

48 http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/hsbc- authoritatively seed that culture elsewhere, swiss-bank-searched-as-officials-launch-money-laundering- before more recently going into the busi- inquiry ness of trying to create franchises in feudal 49 This ambiguity characterizes popular web tools that are supposed to safeguard anonymity, such as . The Edward states, dictatorships, and combinations Snowden leaks revealed that the mere usage of Tor, or even thereof. searching the web for privacy-enhancing tools, actually flags people for NSA scrutiny. A software designed to screen out surveillance actually ends up attracting it. 50 Angelique Chrisafis, “Leading Swiss art broker arrested over alleged price-fixing scam,” Guardian, Feb. 26, 2015. 51 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Bouvier has rejected these allegations, putting the blame on thesis XV, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: the allegedly defrauded Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. Schocken Books, 1988), 261–62.

16 / 21 An ad promotes Duty Free Shopping in Hong Kong.

But the current National Museum of Syria is not above. The documents and records of a different order. Contrary to plans in- produced on the ground end up on a variety spired by the “Bilbao effect,” the museum is of servers worldwide. They are available— hosted online, on countless servers in in theory—on any screen, except in the multiple locations. locations where they were made, where the act of uploading something to YouTube As Jon Rich and Ali Shamseddine have can get people killed. This spatiotemporal noted, it is a collection of online videos—of inversion is almost like a reversal of the documents and records of innumerable freeport aggregate art collections. killings, atrocities, and attacks that remain widely unseen.52 This is the de facto But the entirety of this archive is not adapt- National Museum of Syria, not a Louvre ed to human perception, or at least not franchise acquired by an Assad foundation. to individual perception. Like all large- This accidental archive of videos and other scale databases—including WikiLeaks’ Syria documents is made in different genres and files—it takes the form of a trove of informa- styles, showing people digging through tion without (or with very little) narrative, rubble, or Twitter-accelerated decapitations substantiation, or interpretation. It may be in HD. It shows aerial attacks from below, partly visible to the public, but not necessar- ily entirely intelligible. It remains partly inaccessible, not by means of exclusion, 52 Ali Shamseddine and John Rich, “An Introduction to the New Syrian National Archive,” e-flux journal 60 (Dec. 2014) but because it overwhelms the perceptual

17 / 21 capacity and attention span of any single what traditional autonomous art might have individual. 53 been, had it not been elitist and oblivious to its own conditions of production.54 But duty-free art is more than a reissue of Chapter 9: Autonomy the old idea of autonomous art. It also transforms the meaning of the battered Let’s go back to the examples at the begin- term “artistic autonomy.” Autonomous art ning: the freeport art storage spaces, and under current temporal and spatial circum- the municipal gallery of Diyarbakır, which stances needs to take these very spatial and had become a refugee camp. One space temporal conditions into consideration. Art’s withdraws artworks from the world by conditions of possibility are no longer just hoarding them, while the other basically the elitist “ivory tower,” but also the dicta- sheltered the escapees of collapsing states. tor’s contemporary art foundation, the How and where can art be shown publicly, oligarch’s or weapons manufacturer’s in physical 3-D space, without endangering tax-evasion scheme, the hedge fund’s its authors, while taking into account the trophy,55 the art student’s debt bondage, breathtaking spatial and temporal changes leaked troves of data, aggregate spam, and expressed by these two examples? What the product of huge amounts of unpaid form could a new model of the public “voluntary” labor—all of which results in museum take, and how would the notion art’s accumulation in freeport storage spac- of the “public” itself change radically in the es and its physical destruction in zones of process of thinking though this? war or accelerated privatization. Autonomous art within this context could Let’s think back to the freeport art storage try to understand political autonomy as an spaces and their stock of duty-free art. experiment in building alternatives to a My suggestion is not to shun or belittle this nation-state model that continues to pro- proposition, but to push it even further. claim national culture while simultaneously practicing “constructive instability” by The idea of duty-free art has one major including gated communities for high-net- advantage over the nation-state cultural worth individuals, much like microversions model: duty-free art ought to have no duty— of failed states. To come back to the exam- no duty to perform, to represent, to teach, ple of Switzerland: this country is so pervad- to embody value. It should not be indebted ed by extraterritorial enclaves with down- to anyone, nor serve a cause or a master, sized regulations that it could be more nor be a means to anything. Duty-free art precisely defined as a x-percent rogue entity should not be a means to represent a cul- within a solid watch industry. But extrastate- ture, a nation, money, or anything else. Even craft can also be defined as political autono- the duty-free art in the freeport storage my under completely different circumstanc- spaces is not duty free. It is only tax-free. It es and with very different results, as recent has the duty of being an asset.

Seen like this, duty-free art is essentially 54 Most pronouncedly expressed by Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974). English translation: Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw 53 Note the different strategies for publicizing massive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984): 90. leaks employed by, on the one hand, WikiLeaks, and on the 55 Which might fulfill the traditional role of a “financial other, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, tombstone”—a gadget that commemorates concluded and their numerous collaborators. transactions

18 / 21 The Cultural Center in Suruç, Turkey, here represented, is across the border from the city of Kobanê, the ad- ministrative center of the autonomous canton of the same name, which itself is located in the Rojava region of northern Syria. Photo: Hito Steyerl

experiments in autonomy from Hong Kong After the attack on the Kobanê canton by to Rojava have demonstrated. fighters from the so-called IS in September 2014, the Cultural Center was temporarily But autonomous art could even be art set turned into another refugee camp, hosting free both from its authors and owners. several hundred people who fled from the Remember the disclaimer by OMA? Now besieged region around Kobanê. One of the imagine every art work in freeports to be refugees watched circling bombers through certified by this text: “I am not able to binoculars as the cultural workers and I confirm the authenticity of this artwork.” discussed the role of culture and art.

This is the Cultural Center in Suruç, Turkey. But why am I showing you this? It is across the border from the city of Kobanê, the administrative center of the Remember the top-down view of autonomous canton of the same name, contemporary art? which itself is located in the Rojava region of northern Syria. It is not a coincidence that the autonomous entities in Rojava are called cantons: they have been modeled after Swiss cantons, to emphasize the role that basic democracy played in initially establish- ing them.56

56 However limited basic democracy may have been in Switzerland, given that general female suffrage was not established until 1971, and in Appenzell Innerrhoden not until 1990.

19 / 21 This image is intentionally repeated: The Cultural Center in Suruç, Turkey, here represented, is across the border from the city of Kobanê, the administrative center of the autonomous canton of the same name, which itself is located in the Rojava region of northern Syria. Photo: Hito Steyerl

In my dream—and perhaps also in reality— by Rem Koolhaas that deeply influenced my contemporary art was a layer that served to work—but also junk time.57 screen out the smashing of time and space on the ground. It served to project a disjunc- When we look at this screen from above, tive unity onto a geography marked by we see a model of contemporary art, which systems constructively “failing” to increase has created the secret museum as one of its profitability, nation-states engulfed in civil most important spaces, a model of terminal war, fragmented time, and vast and major impermanence, of privacy and concealment, inequality. But a screen has two sides and of constructive instability. potentially very different functions. It can decrease but also enhance visibility, protect If we only knew what the guy with the and reveal, project and record, expose and binoculars sees from below, we might see conceal. its future public counterpart.

And now please edit this image: it shows the same situation from below, from under the screen.

It points very literally at a bottom-up model from a ground zero where time and space, and in some cases borders and na- tion-states, are smashed, as during the time when the first public museum was founded, creating not only junk space—a term coined 57 A term invented by Sven Lütticken.

20 / 21 This text first appeared in e-flux journal#63, 2015 Published by e-flux

Duty Free Art was also commissioned by The text tremendously benefitted from Artists Space as a lecture. Prior versions editing by Adam Kleinman and Richard were funded by Florence Lo Schemo del Birkett. Thank you Adam Kleinman, Anton Arte Festival and Stedelijk Museum Public Vidokle, Sener Özmen, Fulya Erdemci, Övül Program Amsterdam and preliminary parts Durmosoglu, Aya Moussawi, Simon Sakhai, additionally presented at the CIMAM 2014 Savas Boyraz, Salih Salim, Leyla Toprak, conference in Doha and a talk organized Frank Westermeyer, Jenny Gil, Bartomeu by Victoria Art Foundation Moscow. Mari, Rivers Plasketes, Richard Birkett, Crucial research was made possible by Leonardo Bigazzi, and Hendrik Folkerts. the Moving Museum Istanbul and an invitation by HEAD Geneva. Artists Space Artists Texts and Essay s

21 / 21 22 / 21