It’s a busy Saturday afternoon in the Serpentine Gallery’s cafe, which has a swooping roof and a striking curved glass facade, courtesy of the architect Zaha Hadid. Insistent music is playing, accompanied by the even more insistent squawk of children lunching with their parents. Waiters pass briskly between tables, carrying bowls of zucchini fries, clam tagliatelle and rainbow cake.
This is the glam version of Kensington, all Fendi bags and Belstaff jackets. But what interests my dining companion, the German artist Hito Steyerl, is what happens when you dig beneath Kensington’s upper crust. Yes, the borough is home to Kensington Palace Gardens, the street that boasts some of the most expensive property in the world, but it’s also home to Grenfell Tower. Not all those who tread the paths of Kensington do so in Prada shoes.
Born in Munich in 1966, Steyerl may not be an artist whose name trips off British tongues, but she is held in extraordinary regard within the art world. In 2017, she took pole position in ArtReview magazine’s Power 100. The ranking reflected Steyerl’s critical engagement with technology, as well as her criticism of the art world itself. Duty Free Art, her 2017 book of essays, detailed how culture is used as a fig leaf for questionable corporations and repressive regimes.
“Inequality is pervasive but invisible,” says Steyerl. “It’s hard to see. You need a sort of tool to make it visible.” For her new Serpentine show, Power Plants, she has produced an augmented reality app called Actual Reality OS. This allows the park surrounding the gallery to be viewed on a smartphone screen, with its various elements overlaid with testimonies and data related to hunger, working conditions, austerity and housing.
The app supposedly functions like the glasses in John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror They Live, revealing shocking truths about the modern world. In the film, the truth revealed was the existence of alien overlords manipulating people to spend money. Of course, the inequality revealed in Actual Reality OS isn’t really hidden – the data includes some material already published in the Guardian. But it’s easy to miss it when you’re scoffing zucchini fries surrounded by artfully landscaped flora.
Actual Reality OS is one of four commissions Steyerl has produced for the Serpentine, each exploring politics and technology. Inside its darkened Sackler Gallery, stacks of screens show accelerated footage of plants evolving. Familiar varieties – lily, rose, cactus – have had their futures predicted by artificial intelligence. Steyerl describes these sci-fi flora as “ruderal” – a term for plants that colonise disturbed lands, such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
So these Power Plants are the result of a catastrophe, one that may already be happening. Inside the gallery, there are quotes from fictional botanists hinting at how these plants emerged and what their properties might be. “All appeared widely in London in the wake of recent events,” reads one, dated 2023. “Their seeds found their way into the city via diverse transport routes. Some of them had crossed the city on the boots of soldiers, refugees, or as castaway trash on corporate platforms, via packaging material from imported goods, or hay transported on wagons by the army for horses.”
The Sackler Gallery’s association with the family of the same name, some members of which are facing lawsuits for their alleged role in America’s opioid crisis, has not escaped Steyerl’s notice. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this show is a lot about medicinal plants, or non-opioid-based ways of medication,” she says. “I did consider that, of course.” She nods. “In the app, this building is completely unnamed – which, if you want my point of view, is what I think should happen really. I think, honestly, most of the art institutions that bear that name would be so happy to get rid of it. It would be so easy to do, if they were to talk to one another and introduce some informal regulation that allows them to un-name their institutions.”
A few days after our interview, at the opening of Power Plants, Steyerl went further. “I would like to address the elephant in the room,” The Art Newspaper quoted her as saying. “It’s a very tricky situation that affects a lot of people within the art scene.” She summed up the situation thus: “Imagine you were married to a serial killer and wanted a divorce – it shouldn’t be a problem to get a divorce.”
Often referred to as an artist-theorist, Steyerl has a professorship at Berlin’s University of the Arts, but she is quick to point out that she’s no academic: “I don’t even have a high school degree. So I’m really used to being talked down to, and seen as someone who doesn’t have the education to comprehend. This is why I always try to create an entrance level for works.”
Five years ago, Steyerl’s exhibition at London’s ICA featured sharply satirical video works such as How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. She addressed such global issues as surveillance, migration and the movement of capital. It already feels like another era, she says, a time that was much more connected. “The horizon has narrowed. Now people are focused on their domestic situation.”
In response, her work engages more and more with the sites where it’s shown, though sometimes wider parallels emerge unexpectedly. After the Serpentine show, Steyerl will be at the Venice Biennale in May, then in June at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. All three venues once housed weaponry.
The US exhibition will engage explicitly with gun violence and the Armory’s historic connection to a militia called the Seventh Regiment, which played a role in “founding the National Rifle Association. So it’s basically about trying to read the history of guns, or gun-related organisations in the United States, through the occupants of the building.”
Violence, propaganda and technology are subjects Steyerl often returns to. In 1998, her childhood friend Andrea Woolf was killed fighting for the PKK, a paramilitary group seeking an independent homeland for Kurds in Turkey. The events surrounding her death inspired a number of Steyerl’s earlier works. The artist maintains close ties to the region and to Kurdish artists and film-makers. Has she been back recently? No, she says, the political situation now makes it too risky.
Steyerl pauses. Actually, she says, she was meant to be showing a completely different work in London: a video inspired by a friend recently arrested in Turkey and who fought to grow a garden in jail. “Female prisoners used any means they could to access flower seeds,” she says. “The guards would always try to destroy the flowers and take them away. It was a constant struggle.”
What prevented Steyerl showing this work was not political sensitivity but red tape: the installation she planned contravened the Serpentine’s health and safety regulations. It will be presented, instead, at the Venice Biennale, which means she is unable to go into the precise details. She says Power Plants, its replacement at two months’ notice, was also inspired by the prison garden.
Steyerl can’t help but see a comparison with Grenfell Tower. “I’m all for health and safety regulations,” she says. “But the thing I don’t understand is this: to put up a video, there’s a ton of health and safety regulations, which are really irrational, to the point of not being able to show an artwork. Then, when it comes to real people, where is health and safety? Residents apparently have no health and safety regulations whatsoever – and no one cares.”
Hito Steyerl: Power Plants is at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, until 6 May.
