Minnesota Street Project is pleased to present How Not to be Seen: A F**king Didactic Educational .MOV File, an installation by Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl. The installation features a single-channel digital video as well as sculptural-photographic objects. It will be the first time this work is shown in the Bay Area.

Hito Steyerl is among the most adroit observers of our thoroughly globalized, digitized condition. Her practice describes with uncommon precision the fluidity and mutability of images—how they are produced, interpreted, translated, packaged, transported, and consumed by a multitude of users. 

How Not to be Seen: A F**king Didactic Educational .MOV File, begins with a sweeping shot of photo calibration targets in the California desert utilized by the military and acts as an instructional film on how to avoid being seen in an age of digital surveillance. The proposals for this include becoming smaller than the pixels of high-resolution satellite surveillance (1 foot) or vanishing in virtual shopping malls using green-screen effects, living in a gated community, or even being a female over 50.

In her own words:  “This condition opens up within and by means of an avalanche of digital images, which multiply and proliferate while real people disappear or are fixed, scanned and over-represented by an overbearing architecture of surveillance. How do people disappear in an age of total over-visibility? Which huge institutional and legal effort has to be made to keep things unspoken and unspeakable even if they are pretty obviously sitting right in front of everyone’s eyes? Are people hidden by too many images? Do they go hide amongst other images? Do they become images?”

Hito Steyerl is a prolific filmmaker, video artist and writer. Her solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Artists Space, New York; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2015); Van Abbemuseum, Eidenhoven, The Netherlands; ICA, London; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2013). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Goethe- Institut Buenos Aires, Argentina (2014); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Venice Biennale (2013).

Hito Steyerl is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery.