Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and cultural critic who roots her investigative practice in the proliferation of digital images and their large-scale implications. Her practice takes a strong political stand, while being unafraid to challenge the power of the art market, the politics of images, and the state of human consciousness in the age of technologically advanced capitalism. Taking the form of essays, lectures, installations, video, and photography, her work is combined with dogged outspokenness and academics to critically influence agendas internationally.
This creator reveals her most recent installation in the U.S. to date, commissioned by the Armory and curated by Park Avenue Armory’s visual arts curator Tom Eccles. Steyerl utilizes both the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and historic interiors of the building in mounting both pre-existing works as well as new projects commissioned by the Armory in her ongoing illumination of the world’s power structures, inequalities, obscurities, and delights. When viewed collectively, this material allows the viewer to zoom in on and out from some of the most complex and pressing issues of our time.
Artist Talk: Drill
Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 6:00pm
Tickets: $15
Hito Steyerl is joined by Anton Vidokle (artist and founder of e-flux), Christopher B. Toepfer (founder of The Neighborhood Foundation), and Ayham Ghraowi (Producer and Assistant Director of Drill) for a conversation about the inspirations, ideas, and creative development of her Armory installation. Curator Tom Eccles moderates.
Performance Lecture: Drill
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 3:00pm
Tickets: $10
Learning/Unlearning of Violence: Performance Lecture by Vanessa Gravenor
What remnants remain from the US-Pakistani-Saudi proxy war in 1980s Afghanistan – those that continue to write themselves on bodies involved in terrorism, and in the War on Terror? This performance lecture by artist Vanessa Gravenor critically approaches political language coming from the upper echelons of the American government through its inverse: language inserted from below in pedagogy books funded by USAID and other American backers trying to defeat the Soviets and distributed among the Afghani refugees along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Linguistic “lines of fire” are reversed in order to understand present-day feedback loops. The artist will additionally analyze a biographical vocabulary list used when undergoing PTSD therapy, following her injury in the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
Screening & Conversation
Saturday, July 20, 2019 at 3:00pm & 5:00pm
Tickets: $10
The Dead Walk Into a Bar:Screening & Conversation with Anton Vidokle, Adam Khalil, and Bayley Sweitzer
The distant future. An orbital facility of unknown origin. Here, the debt of taking a life will be finally repaid…. through resurrection. The victims of military violence across time are systematically brought back to life and guided through the all-too-familiar facility. As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit. We, the resurrected, overwhelmed by a literal second life, will of course discover our one inevitable destination: a place to sit, have a drink, and talk it out.
Content advisory: The Dead Walk into a Bar contains nudity and material that some may find challenging.
A New Commission by Park Avenue Armory
This exhibition has been made possible in part by the Yanghyun Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with generous support from Ken Kuchin and Tyler Morgan.
Installation view of Drill © James Ewing
June 20–July 21, 2019
Monday–Thursday from 12:00pm–8:00pm
Friday from 12:00pm–10:00pm
Saturday–Sunday from 12:00pm–7:00pm
General Admission: $20 (plus fees)
Seniors: $15 (plus fees)
Students: $12 (plus fees)
Free for Armory members and Armory IDNYC members, and children 5 years and under
Wade Thompson Drill Hall
Other ways to buy:
Tickets can be purchased by phone by calling the Box Office at (212) 933-5812 Monday–Friday, 10:00 AM–6:00 PM.
Stay Late for Armory After Hours:
Join us on Friday evenings, when the installation stays open until 10:00pm, for libations at a special bar on the second floor.
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