Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die
by Nando Alvarez-Perez
Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016. Installed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2019.
The weight of history and anxiety for the future collide in Hito Steyerl’s Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016), a video installation first commissioned for the 32nd Bienal de São Paolo and now part of the artist-theorist-filmmaker-influencer’s retrospective Hito Steyerl: This is the Future at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The title is a combination of the five words that have appeared most frequently in the names of songs on English-language music charts over the past decade; in the installation, these are spelled out in bold, white, glowing letters and framed in sprayed concrete, becoming benches for viewers.
Drywall framing and aluminum sheeting divide the installation into two parts, each containing a short, looping video. The larger of the two sections features a hypercut of footage gathered from the internet of robot technology testing labs in which humanoid machines are subjected to physical abuse by their makers in the name of technological progress. The second video, Robots Today, shown on a single monitor in the smaller area of the installation, is set in Diyarbakır, the unofficial capital of Turkish or Northern Kurdistan. It recounts personal stories from the region as well as the story of Ismail al-Jazari, a twelfth-century engineer whose mechanical inventions presaged modern robotics.
Steyerl’s heady exploration of the present feels objective—here we’re presented with real pop charts, real robots, real ethnography, real conflict zones—and it verges almost on the omniscient in its prescience and knowledge of the eerie intimacies between local history and global technology.
But Hell Yeah We Fuck Die and similar projects are more thin cuts across the broad grain of the present. Like her whizbang critical theory, HYWFD evinces a response of certainty, of “wow! This is the way things are,” but even in its considerable scope, it is inevitably partial in its reflection of the present. The results are undeniably fascinating if reductive.
