Hito Steyerl at the MAK

Until 11 January 2026, the MAK in Vienna is honouring the work of the German-Japanese filmmaker and artist Hito Steyerl with two expansive multimedia installations. Steyerl became known for her documentary and episodic films, in which she deals with the sovereignty in interpreting politics and the interest-led production of truth. She also deals with the question of the status of the historical document in images and textual expressions. Thus, in Steyerl's works, a critical, formal examination of the binding nature of images and linguistic testimonies repeatedly takes place parallel to the subject matter of content.

In her multimedia installations, with which she now addresses the interweaving of political conflicts and current technological developments, she remains true to her approach of ‘critical documentarism`: through the montage of film and animated video sequences and the embedding of text in the form of image elements, commentary or lines of dialogue.

In addition to the work on loan from the LBBW Collection entitled “Hell Yeah We Fuck Die” (2016), the show at the MAK also features “Mechanical Kurds” (2025), which was completed this year. Both video installations refer to the political conflict over equal rights for Kurdish communities in the territories of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. “Hell Yeah We Fuck Die" de facto interweaves two video works within a modularly constructed course of poles, in which various cube elements made of illuminated letters, which reproduce the individual words of the work's title, are embedded. According to the American music magazine “Billboard”, these are the most frequently used words in the English-language music charts of the 2010s.

The video of the same name, “Hell Yeah We Fuck Die“, documents laboratory tests with robots that are trained to rescue people from disaster areas. The second video, “Robots Today”, is a montage of film sequences from the Kurdish regions in south-east Turkey, from Diyarbakir and the city of Cizre, which now resembles a ghost town. As the film progresses, we learn that it is the birthplace of the Arab author and engineer al-Jazari, who wrote a work on ingenious mechanical engineering devices in 1205 and is still considered the most important source on the high standard of technical inventions in the Middle Ages in the Arab world. The video images from the destroyed city are accompanied by subtitles and a soundtrack that includes a dialogue with the digital voice assistant Siri about the use of computers in war.

The video installation “Mechanical Kurds” also encompasses the entire room and interweaves the exhibition space with the cinematically staged image spaces of the video. Two auto rickshaws provide visitors with seats in front of a large screen, which is set into two cuboids. The construction refers to the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), a space for projecting a three-dimensional illusionary world of virtual reality. Individual sequences in the video reproduce precisely this fictional, virtual world. One of its settings shows a refugee camp, which a group of visitors drives through in auto rickshaws and is attacked by drones.

Another storyline in the video consists of interviews with Syrian refugees who were stranded in camps in the Kurdish regional administration areas in northern Iraq and were recruited by global digital companies. Their job as so-called micro-workers was data tagging to teach AIs how to identify objects, they report. This tagging process is also illustrated in a video sequence. In the meantime, however, the learning ability of civilian and military AI has progressed so far that it can continue to develop itself without human support.

The title of the work „Mechanical Kurds“ refers not only to the Kurdish conflict and the effects of the Syrian civil war on the current catastrophic situation in the region of former Kurdistan. As in "Hell Yeah We Fuck Die", the artist again draws a historical arc in this work, this time back to the 18th century, to the "Schachtürken (mechanical Turk)" of the Viennese court official Wolfgang von Kempelen. The mechanical chess automaton gave the impression that the device was capable of playing chess all by itself. In fact, a small human being was hidden in the box and operated the device.

It not only shows the partly absurd implications of technological armament. But it also impressively illustrates a precarious present that, under the influence of AI, may soon no longer be able to distinguish between fact, fake and fiction.

Hito Steyerl: Der Menschheit ist die Kugel bei einem Ohr hinein und beim anderen herausgeflogen
MAK Contemporary, MAK Wien
25. Juni 2025 – 11. Januar 2026

Illustration above, Hito Steyerl: Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2025. Videostill, Detail, Leihgabe Sammlung LBBW. ©Hito Steyerl, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025