One of the artist’s most acclaimed video installations, Factory of the Sun debuted at the German Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennale and travelled widely thereafter. Upon entry into the immersive installation, audiences are transported into a virtual space defined by a glowing perspectival grid of blue LED lights and populated by an array of white beach chairs. Onscreen, the distinctions between reality and fiction dissolve in a montage of YouTube dance videos, drone surveillance footage, video games, fictitious news, and real documentation of international student uprisings. Notions of time and space expand and collapse within this virtual world, reflecting our contemporary reality and the ceaseless transmission of images and information (and misinformation) around the globe.Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich; lives and works in Berlin) is a filmmaker, artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. She studied Documentary Film at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image and the University of Television and Film in Munich. Received a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Academy of the Arts in Vienna. Her prolific filmmaking and writing occupies a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have increasingly addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals, often online.In her practice, Steyerl focuses on the role of media, technology and the circulation of images in the era of digital nativism. The artist creates installations in which film production is associated with the construction of architectural environments.
