ESSAYS HITO STEYERL THE KISS 24 AUGUST – 21 OCTOBER 2012

In this exhibition Hito Steyerl investigates the role images and technological tools play as witnesses to the truth.

ESSAY

Surface Manifestations

By Alwin Franke

Over the past two decades film- maker, video artist and writer Hito Steyerl has repeatedly engaged with issues of political violence and their relation to documentary film- making. In her installation The Kiss Steyerl combines various documen- tary and non-documentary ele- ments related to a war crime com- mitted in 1993 during the Bosnian War. A central component in the installation is a triple video projec- tion composed of point clouds cap- tured by a lidar 3D scanner. The scan captures a re-staging of the crime scene according to three eye- witness accounts. The investigative report from which the witness ac- counts are drawn, a sculptural ren- dering of the scan as a 3D print and a television news report on a relat- ed forensic investigation constitute the other coordinates of a space in which the ineffability of terror and the objectivist dreams associated Hito Steyerl, The Kiss (video still), 2012 with 3D technologies are superim- posed. At Overgaden, The Kiss is out the abduction and upon whose He was the last person to be tak- our contemporary reality, then, as stan. The case has never been in- for the first time shown along with orders, nor is it known what the en from the train, and on his way different layers of this reality itself. vestigated. The montage of footage Steyerl’s new video sketch Abstract. authorities have done to solve the to the truck Milan Lukic, leader of The Kiss condenses these layers from the battlefield interlaced with case. The fate of the missing pas- the White Eagles, tapped him on of the documentary and the non- shots showing Steyerl at Pariser In recent years, it has been ob- sengers is also a mystery.’ Already the shoulder, kissed him and said, documentary, zigzagging from the Platz in Berlin not only addresses served how new 3D technologies on 5 March of the same year, some ‘There is my brother.’ Given the im- witnesses’ subjectivity and the re- the complicity of German interests have brought about a three-dimen- ten days after the abduction, an possibility to retrieve the meaning staging of their accounts to the ob- in war crimes worldwide; it also sionalisation of perspective, re- anonymous witness had spoken of this gesture, it just documents jectivist promise of the scanner’s evokes the exchange between the placing the paradigm of linear vi- about what happened on train 671: the loss of reference in the reality lens, back to the fictional fix of the film-maker’s subject and the docu- sion with a new visual normality of ‘The most horrific thing was there of paramilitary terror. Here it is pre- distorted data and their rendering mented object, addressing another free-fall and groundlessness, of fog, was actually no fuss. As if nothing cisely the documentary evidence as a material object by a 3D printer. posture that Steyerl’s work tries to murk and epistemological uncer- had happened, the train just car- in the light-boxes that refers us tainty.1 If we cut to a different scene ried on.’3 The entanglement of mys- back to a foggy surface that resists It is the insistence on ‘not understanding’ that makes for the sensibility and turn to the use of 3D technolo- tery and normality, of uncertainty pene­tration. of Hito Steyerl’s work – a sensibility for grasping at the edges of things gies in forensic science, however, and certainty, conveyed here is de- before they become fixed, smoothed and siphoned up by discourses that the imagery and metaphors sud- scribed by the anthropologist Hence forensic laser scan technolo­ do claim to understand. denly flip. Here 3D scanning ren- Michael Taussig as a death-space of gy is of no positive use in the docu­ ders the world transparent and cal- epistemic murk, a magical reality mentation of these events. The If laser-scan technology subtracts escape, namely that of the ‘under- culable; it is praised for overcoming in which the signifiers are strate- preservation of the crime scene as time out of history, The Kiss rein- standing’ documentarian. ‘But I the uncertainty of subjective inter- gically out of joint with what they digital replication turns out to be troduces both time and movement, don’t understand anything’, Steyerl pretation by freezing a crime scene signify.4 an empty promise in a case where, as with the scanner’s lens scanning stated in one of her films. Perhaps and preserving it forever: ‘Data six months after the events took Milan Lukic kissing the black man it is this insistence on ‘not under- from the ScanStation is not a 3D re- After the war, however, most of the place, nobody seems to even know while walking him to the truck. The standing’ that makes for the sensi- construction or someone’s interpre- passengers were identified and the what crime and on what scene. Yet material rendering of the move- bility of her work – a sensibility for tation of the scene. It is the scene,’ events leading up to their death re- perhaps there is a kind of negative ment in the sculptural 3D print is a grasping at the edges of things be- as Leica Geosystem’s forensic web- constructed. The abduction was documentary potential here, one blur that bears the marks of time, fore they become fixed, smoothed site would have it.2 Faced with this carried out by a Serbian paramili- that documents not a truth beneath hovering between the abstract and and siphoned up by discourses that flip-flopping between the transpar- tary unit known as the White Eagles. the surface but instead the truth in the figurative. And the points defin- do claim to understand. ent and the opaque, The Kiss con- The nineteen victims were robbed, the surface, echoing Siegfried Kra- ing the surfaces float apart in space fronts the reality of murk with that tortured and then driven to the vil- cauer’s take on ‘surface manifesta- when, in the animation, the came­ra Alwin Franke studies Comparative Literature of clinical transparency and makes lage of Visegrad, where they were tions’, the analysis of which he felt flies through crystallised move- at Freie Universität in Berlin and has worked them work within one other, but killed and their remains thrown in best for determining an epoch’s ment. It is this flip-flop between as a guest-editor for New York Magazine of Contem­porary Art and Theory and Tribes 5 place in the historical process. movement and stasis, certainty and Magazine. There is a certain persistence of the surface in The Kiss, an impossibility There is a certain persistence of the uncertainty, that the visual logic of to go behind the scene and reach the depth perspective promised by 3D surface in The Kiss, an impossibility The Kiss documents. technology. to go behind the scene and reach 1 Hito Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall,’ e-flux journal, no. the depth perspective promised by But if this is a space where the sig- 24, April 2011. 2 See http://www.leica-geosystems.us/ also re-politicises confusion and the River Drina. But this retrospec- the technology, as conveyed in the nifiers are strategically out of joint forensic/3d_scanning.html. disorientation by tracing them back tive reconstruction of the events faces’ turning as the camera flies with what they signify, one can per- 3 War Crimes in Serbia, Youth Initiative for to material history. does not release us from the ‘epis- around them. This hints at a truth haps again ask some political ques- Human Rights, special edition, February temic murk’ expressed in the Vreme that lurks in the interstices between tions we seem to have lost sight of: 2010. The events on which The Kiss is article. Not only are most of the 2D and 3D, in the fractional space whose strategy, on whose behalf, 4 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Heal- based took place in post-socialist bodies still missing, there is also an Steyerl has referred to as 2.3D or and in whose interest? These are ing, University of Chicago Press, 1986. Yugoslavia. On 27 February 1993 inconsistency regarding the num- 2.4D, where the documentary ele- the questions that Steyerl’s video 5 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, about twenty people were abduct- ber of victims. The three eyewit- ments become an index of the non- sketch Abstract insists on. In 1998 in: New German Critique, no. 5, Spring 1975. ed from the Belgrade-Bar train ness accounts exhibited in light- documentable.6 Steyerl’s friend Andrea Wolf, who 6 Hito Steyerl: Objectifiction, lecture, 2nd Berlin Documentary Forum, 2 June 2012. number 671. Half a year later, on boxes mention a twentieth victim, had joined the PKK women’s army, 16 August, the weekly Vreme NDA a black man who is omitted in the Certainty and uncertainty associ- supposedly died in an extra-legal published a short article about the other reports and whose iden- ated with three-dimensionalisation execution after a battle with armed case: ‘It is not known who carried tity has never been sought after. are not so much different takes on forces in the Turkish part of Kurdi­ ESSAY

Tracing the Dead

By Maja Petrovic-Šteger

On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 February 1993 some thirty armed men escorted nineteen non-Serbs – eighteen Bosniaks and one Croat – off train number 671 from Bel- grade to Bar. Forced out at Štrpci, a village in the Republic of Srpska where trains do not normally stop, the group were taken onto an army truck waiting in the shade. Of the thousand or so passengers, only a handful stood up to defend the others. No one phoned the police or further raised their voice to in- terrupt the kidnapping. The media in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia immediately reported the event, speculating that the abduction had been carried out by a gang of thugs as retaliation for supposed crimes committed by Bosniaks. Although the abductees’ families immediately pressed the governments of Serbia and Montenegro to investigate the case, it remained unexamined for years. The relatives of the missing people put up money, or offered to swap places, to get their loved ones Hito Steyerl, The Kiss, 2012. Photo: Helena Schlichting back. Some believed that the cap- tives were intended as prisoners of Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The construct bodily fragments as bits the same implications. Using testi- tion of ‘the missing’ – both the miss- war, to be exchanged for Serbian kidnapping was not spontaneous of knowledge, assigning them an mony and biomedical and forensic ing train passengers and the ab- POWs or corpses, others that they but rather a premeditated opera- evidentiary status, sometimes as evidence from the Štrpci massa- sence of reliable information about had been conscripted as forced la- tion indicative of the state’s policies traces of past power relations. The cre, Steyerl translates scans of the the event. Hito Steyerl casts the bour, others again that the group towards Bosniaks in the 1990s. It other position is more avowedly crime scene into a three-dimension- intrinsic value of ‘facts’ and ‘docu- had fallen into the hands of the has also been shown that senior of- emotional: Interest groups claim a al print to get a sense of where the ments’ not as material (as facts that Korn­jaca brothers, who allegedly ficials in the FRY government knew biological or emotional relationship abductors stood in relation to their have been discovered, crimes that dissected their bodies while they of plans for the abduction but made to body parts, sometimes attribut­ victims and so generate possible have been solved or remains ma- were still alive in order to sell their no effort to prevent it. ing to them the spirit or soul of findings overlooked in previous in- terially reattached as objects and organs and blood. those they have lost. People switch vestigations, while other parts of reunited with the relatives of the The wars of the 90s are now most- between these frameworks in deal- the installation document the ex- bodies) but as essentially conceived The identities of all nineteen ab- ly understood in terms of inter- ing with the dead. The state- and humation of those killed during the or projected. Her work importantly ductees were made public. But national restorative justice. Pri- governmental-level procedures us- war. The audience is basically in- reminds us that body parts acquire some claimed that one addition- vate individuals reclaim the dead ing scientific expertise to prove vited to ‘repiece’ the events at the a meaning, as do the events of the al passenger had been taken that in order to assuage their pain and crimes against humanity allow peo- Štrpci station, a process requiring abduction, only through participa- day – a tall, elegantly dressed black sense of loss, while public organisa- ple to repatriate remains legally. a consideration of the nature of tive processes of searching, identi- man, or a mulatto, as some referred tions do so to prove claims of ‘atro­ Consequently, relatives of the dead ‘knowledge’ and ‘documentation’ – fying, claiming and collecting ‘what to him, possibly an Egyptian, who city’ through scientific analyses of appeal to the tools, languages and and so calling into question the no- happened’. Otherwise, in the regi­ was seen offering money to the corpses. Dead bodies are identified, practices of scientific expertise in tion that the methods of forensic ster simply of material fact, they re- armed group to secure his re- counted and lent to a variety of attempting to secure some val- investigation are the ultimate tools main inaccessible. lease. Others thought this dark- symbolic purposes. The dead body ue from remains. Intervention in for reconstructing the past. skinned passenger was a member however already had a strong politi- the disposal of remains, whether Maja Petrovic-Šteger is a social anthropolo- of the paramilitary group itself – a cal resonance in the former Yugo­ by relatives or by the state, is in- The Kiss does not then directly re­ gist specialized in how living and dead bodies famous­ly violent local Roma. Seve­ slavia long before the conflicts. For evitably fraught with political va­ present the Štrpci event. Instead, it and body parts become objects of artistic, economic and scientific attention. ral witnesses reported that the instance Serbian war apologists in- lues. These values typically express subtly if piercingly dissects the no- leader of the armed group hugged voked the motif of bones – magic themselves in either a question- and kissed the man, calling him ‘my caskets holding the soul of the ing or an endorsement of the eth- CV brother’, before marching him off. Serbs – to rouse an appetite for ics of intervention itself. For its cri­ His identity, and indeed existence, war and stake territorial claims. To- tics, manipulating body parts is an Hito Steyerl (b. 1966) was educated at the University of the Arts in Tokyo and the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts has never been confirmed. day, almost two decades after the intrusion into the dead person’s in Vienna. She has had several solo exhibitions, recently at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 2012; signing of the peace accord, post- membership of his or her commu- Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, 2011; Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2010; Henie Onstad Konstsenter, The national and international in- conflict attempts at sense-making nity. For its advocates, it is a benign Høvikodden, 2010, and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 2009. Her work has been included in group vestigations that took place ten and reconciliation still take shape reinstatement of the value of the exhibitions and biennials all over the world, among others at the Taipei Biennial, Taiwan, 2010; years after the event have shown around the bodies of those who bodies. The two claims – scientific 8th Gwangju Biennial, 2010, and Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007. In November Steyerl has a solo ex- hibition at Art Institute Chicago. Hito Steyerl lives in Berlin. that the kidnapped passengers died. A peacetime rhetoric of na- and emotional – construct the dead were brutally beaten, robbed, and tional integrity equates the heal- bodies as different kinds of things GUIDED TOURS then killed on the day of their ab- ing of the region with the rightful and different kinds of people. Those duction. The bodies of some have assignation of human remains. For seeking to find, identify and repatri- Sunday 26 August and Sunday 2 September at 3pm Overgaden invites you to a guided tour yet to be found. Investigations also the international community, the ate dead bodies do not just make a of the current exhibitions. Afterwards we will serve coffee and cake. The events will be in Danish. confirmed that the paramilitary unit people of the former Yugoslavia claim to ownership; they designate UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS responsible for the abduction had are committing themselves to re­ bodies as vehicles through which logistical support from the Federal conciliation by beginning to reckon particular versions of history and Friday 9 November 2012 Overgaden presents a group exhibition by Suzanna Asp, Maija with the evidence of war crimes – of the future are legitimated. In this Luutonen, Sini Pelkki and Pilvi Takala and a solo exhibition by Stefan A. Pedersen. The last day of the exhibitions is 20 January 2013. the sites of mass graves and miss- way dead bodies touch on account- ing persons. Estimating that more ability, justice, grief, victimisation, Hito Steyerl would like to thank Esme Buden, Aneta Szylak / Wyspa Institute of Art and Nikolaus than 40,000 people remain unac- and suffering. Political versions of Hirsch / Portikus for producing the works, her assistant Alwin Franke, Studio Miessen for the counted for, various local and in- the body thus rest on institutionally spatial design of the show, Henriette Bretton-Meyer and the team of Overgaden and the teams ternationally-run repatriation pro- constituted practices that produce that realised The Kiss and Abstract.

grammes are working on behalf bodies (and things out of bodies) in Images: courtesy of the artist and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. of the families to retrieve remains certain ways. through DNA-led methods. These Copy-editing: Matthew Taylor acts of reclamation are often de- People’s relations to dead bodies scribed in terms of the restoration can, then, hinge on their structur- This exhibition folder can be downloaded from www.overgaden.org of ‘universal’ or ‘human’ rights. ing of concepts of the past and the present, and on the political, bio- Who claims human remains and medical, artistic and philosophical why? Two claims made about bo­ implications of these concepts of Hito Steyerl, The Kiss (detail), 2012. dies stand out. One is profession- time. Hito Steyerl’s searching instal- Overgaden is supported by the Danish Arts Council’s Commitee for Visual Arts Photo: Leon Kahane al: Scientists and legal officers re- lation, The Kiss, opens up some of and the Obel Family Foundation

Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art, Overgaden neden Vandet 17, DK-1414 Copenhagen K, + 45 3257-7273, [email protected], www.overgaden.org. Tuesday-Sunday 1-5pm, Thursday 1-8pm Design: Anni’s