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 pene tration. 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 came ra 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 Contem porary 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.