November

In November, Hito Steyerl investigates the role images play in revolution, mounting a critique of the visual rhetoric present in the media’s reproduction of historical events. In the film the artist takes up television footage relating to an event in 1998: the killing of Andrea Wolf – a well-known activist, sociologist and childhood friend of the artist, and a member of the PKK, the Kurdish liberation movement in Kurdistan. In the work, a voice-over introduces and comments on Kurdish television documentaries. We also find extracts from Bruce Lee films and scenes from an amateur film made by the two friends as teenagers, with a very young Hito. The video contains references between distant territories, such as Turkey and Germany, which the artist shows to be linked by real facts, such as the bullets sold to the Turkish army by the socialist government after the fall of the Berlin Wall.