Reading Day 8
Hito Steyerl, November, 25' #review
Review by OK
‘Images do not represent reality, they create reality, they are second nature’ November is a visual investigation of the role of images in the revolutions. It explores how visual languages have the power to even shape different realities. In this short video essay, Hito Steyrel takes us with her on a journey to see how one particular image of a seventeen years old German girl was used for the Kurdish cause many years later, after her execution as a terrorist somewhere in northern Iraq by Turkish forces. In her exploration, Steyrel thoroughly uses archival materials from a vast variety of resources, from Bruce Lee and Martial Arts movies, to American B-movies, from documentary footage films about the Kurdish cause, to a commemoration of the Soviet Bavarian Republic in Münich. At first, this video seems to be an autobiographical piece about Steyrel’s best friend, Andrea Wolf. Together they had shot a feminist Martial Arts B-movie in 1983, in which Andrea was ‘its glamorous star’. In this movie, which was never finished, three girls are continuously fighting the bad guys, and in the end, it was Andrea who could kill them and disappear into the horizon, riding a motorcycle. This was fiction, a non-reality in which Andrea had become the hero in fighting evil.
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