Liquidity Inc. by Hito Steyerl

Friday 9.10, 17:00–20:00 is the opening day for the exhibition Liquidity Inc. by Hito Steyerl. At 18:30 Hito Steyerl and Maria Lind, director at Tensta konsthall, will have a conversation.

“Be water, my friend” reads the initial phrase in Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc. (2014), a video installation about the formless, floating, violent, and simultaneously vital water. In Liquidity Inc., water gushes out of television screens and iPhone screen savers. It functions both as a liquid and as an inexhaustible metaphor: the liquefied form of capital, the dot-com bubble when it bursts.

Using montage as its idiom, Liquidity Inc. tells the story of Jacob Wood, a martial arts enthusiast who lost his job when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis. Wood was born during the Vietnam War and came to the US as part of President Gerald Ford's Operation Babylift, an extensive adoption program in which several thousands of homeless and orphaned children were adopted from Vietnam and brought to the United States. Wood's story is interspersed with footage from boxing matches and weather disasters, Hito Steyerl’s own chat conversations, and images from an ocean and a horizon where the water seems to speak in its own typeface: “I am water. I'm not from here.”

With Liquidity Inc., Steyerl consolidates her position as a playful, connected, and anxious artist. The thirty minute video is equally a story about the lack of contours and about control, about Inc., Incorporation. About water as a company, and the company as a movement in water that infiltrates, washing across all bodies.

Liquidity Inc. is on view as the final part of The New Model, a project initiated by Tensta konsthall in 2011. The New Model’s starting point is Palle Nielsen’s The Model: A model for a qualitative society that was installed at Moderna Museet in 1968. Participants in The New Model—Lars Bang Larsen, Magnus Bärtås, Ane Hjort Guttu, Dave Hullfish Bailey, and Hito Steyerl—have been invited
 to investigate the heritage from The Model in a number of projects, seminars, workshops and exhibitions (Steyerl’s contribution is an already existing work).