{"id":359977,"date":"2025-12-20T07:28:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T07:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/359977\/"},"modified":"2025-12-20T07:28:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T07:28:12","slug":"hito-steyerls-conservative-turn-artreview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/359977\/","title":{"rendered":"Hito Steyerl\u2019s \u2018Conservative\u2019 Turn – ArtReview"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the artist\u2019s new exhibition, Steyerl continues to lead the pushback against AI slop and digital individualism<\/p>\n

The work of Berlin-based Hito Steyerl has always stayed with a particular trouble \u2013 the life and fate of images as they circulate the systems and economies of the contemporary world, and the lives and fate of people, caught up in these same circuits. In both of these, politics is never distant from how subjects and their images appear or are erased. For an artist who has become synonymous with a response to the dangers and perversities of techno-culture \u2013 and obsessively attentive to its latest developments \u2013 the calamitous arrival of AI might be a worst nightmare realised. So, following on from this year\u2019s fiercely AI-critical book Medium Hot<\/a>, Steyerl continues her pushback in her new exhibition The Island.<\/p>\n

Since her breakout 2007 film Lovely Andrea, Steyerl has honed a style of collagelike video essay, both acerbic and playful, that features allusive mixes of critical exposition, documentary fragments and an absurdist CGI- and effects-driven satire, alongside delirious reflections on society, capitalism and technology. Here she uses the technology of generative \u2018AI slop\u2019 videomaking to attack it, while seeking out some kind of viable alternative, politically and culturally, when faced with the ubiquitous presence of deepfaked, algorithmically \u2013 and ideologically \u2013 driven online content.<\/p>\n

Housed in the blacked-out interior of Fondazione Prada\u2019s penthouse gallery, with visitors guided by TRON-like blue luminescent floor-strips, are videos and video sculptures. The Island centres around an eponymous, madcap videowork, in which its comic protagonist, the avatar of Flash Gordon returned from the 1980s film (here hammed up winningly by German actor Mark Waschke) has appeared on the streets of the picturesque Croatian island town of Kor\u010dula, to \u2018save the world\u2019. The choice of Kor\u010dula links not only to the Croatian-born science-fiction historian Darko Suvin, whose recollections of his childhood during the Second World War intercut AI sequences and Flash\u2019s adventures, but also to the story of a submerged but evidently manmade artificial island, dating to neolithic times, that was discovered offshore.<\/p>\n

As Flash chases around Kor\u010dula, Steyerl connects the apparently unrelated themes of archaeology, quantum physics and science fiction through the voices and stories of Suvin, the quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco, punctuated by the transcendent voices of Croatian a cappella group Klapa Ivo Lozica through precarious associative leaps. These weave past and future, alternative realities and historical recurrences: an elderly Suvin muses on the \u2018brown tide\u2019 of fascism that swept Europe, which is visually reprised by the giant AI tidal wave of shit seen engulfing an AI\u2019d Kor\u010dula; Flash battles his evil AI-spawned double; and then there\u2019s the historical doubling of Kor\u010dula and its vanished prehistoric twin.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Island, 2025 (installation view at Fondazione Prada, Milan Osservatorio). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/p>\n

\"\"The Island, 2025 (installation view at Fondazione Prada, Milan Osservatorio). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada<\/p>\n

Elsewhere the quantum-physics theme is reprised in sculptures that look at once low- and high-tech: on entering the gallery, visitors are met by two large glowing, concave projection-spheres, into which looping simulations of Kor\u010dula and the underwater archaeological site appear rendered as glittering, quantum particle-like CGI artefacts. Beyond the projection screen of The Island are two-metre-plus-tall armatures of metal and driftwood, like postapocalyptic astrolabes, onto which are braced translucent hemispherical cupolas in which the same renderings of these sites flicker and swirl. Meanwhile a circle of video screens presents longer versions of interviews with those interlocutors who appear in The Island, extending and contextualising the fragments we find in the film.<\/p>\n

For all its careening editing and spoof aesthetic, Steyerl\u2019s film is driven by the bleak intuition that our AI-slopped culture could well be threatened with its own collapse. In a perhaps self-conscious nod to her own predicament as a \u2018critical\u2019 artist, during a sequence in which, the titles explain, Flash \u2018enters the slop world to fight his AI copy\u2019 (an AI-generated sequence in which Flash lightsabre-duels his doppelganger through the streets of Kor\u010dula, amid crowds of panicking bystanders), the comic-book-styled subtitles conclude ruefully that Flash realises he \u2018cannot fight slop with more slop\u2019. Watching further lurid AI-generated clips of the crocodile-headed bomber \u2018Bombardino Crocodilo\u2019 (a spawn of this year\u2019s latest ironic-reactionary viral meme fad, Italian Brain Rot), one is tempted to agree.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"The Island, 2025 (stills), single channel HD video. Courtesy the artist, Fondazione Prada, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin\/Paris\/Seoul<\/p>\n

Steyerl\u2019s way out of this hellscape depends on what we make of the other two elements that make up The Island. Archaeology and physics here stand in as guarantors of any remaining sense of reality \u2013 since science is still rooted in the principle of speculation, testing and verification \u2013 in the face of the irreality of the AI image-machine that might now be accelerating both social disintegration and cultural psychosis.<\/p>\n

In one way The Island hardens and raises the stakes of Steyerl\u2019s previous reflections of the entanglement of image and materiality: it suggests a greater intolerance, in the circumstances, towards the infinitely degrading world of the digital image. And if a leftist materialist politics still survives here, it does so in a desire to reassert the \u2018truth\u2019 of human reality, its rootedness in material circumstance.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Island, 2025 (still), single channel HD video. Courtesy the artist, Fondazione Prada, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin\/Paris\/Seoul<\/p>\n

But it also renders itself in another form, which unlike the AI slop is also a human-made art. There\u2019s an oddly conservative conclusion to The Island, though if it\u2019s \u2018conservative\u2019 it\u2019s in the sense of wanting to retain what is worth preserving. The Island ends with an astonishing choral finale, as six members of Klapa Ivo Lozica, standing on the quayside of Kor\u010dula, sing a paean to the sea at day\u2019s end. Lyrically it\u2019s steeped in folkloric traditionalism, a mythos of place and rootedness (a big shift for Steyerl, whose visual lexicon has tended to be those of techno music videos, cable news idents and online gaming). Aesthetically, the resonance of the singers\u2019 close harmonies, shaking the gallery\u2019s sound system, brings us back to the physical presence (though still mediated by technology) of human voices and human bodies, and the material relationships between them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s odd to think of The Island as Steyerl\u2019s \u2018back to basics\u2019 moment, but as culture drifts further into the delusional and solipsistic nihilism of mimetic AI and of isolated, paranoid individuals, the artist\u2019s insistence on the fact of material reality, of place and people, also seems to signal the limit of a certain period of critical art, with which Steyerl has been long identified. Here instead is a shift to an idea of the art as affect and affirmation \u2013 an uncertain, perhaps positive return to the power of aesthetic experience and production, and the human agency \u2013 against the tide of slop \u2013 it implies. <\/p>\n

The Island at Fondazione Prada, Milan Osservatorio, through 30 October 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

Read next Hito Steyerl\u2019s Medium Hot and the age of slop<\/a><\/p>\n

J.J. Charlesworth<\/a>Reviews<\/a>December 19, 2025ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the artist\u2019s new exhibition, Steyerl continues to lead the pushback against AI slop and digital individualism The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-359977","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}