Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013 (Video still), Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
How have human beings, and their essential humanity, changed in the past 16 years? THE NEW HUMAN, a group exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, attempts to parse out this question through art produced exclusively in this millennium. Film- and video-based, the show takes on the troubling issues of our age: the social and political fallout of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror, the humanitarian disasters that followed the hope of the Arab Spring, the rise of neo-fascist and nationalist sentiments in Europe, the refugee crisis… the list goes on.
The featured works come from 15 artists from around the world. Tomáš Rafa's Refugees on Their Way to Western Europe, for example, is an ongoing documentary of the movement of and reaction to refugees across the European continent; Adel Abdessemed's God is Design mobilizes animation into a metaphorical experiment in religion, where the symbols of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism blend both into each other and into schematized illustrations of human cells; meanwhile, Hito Steyerl takes on mass surveillance in the instructional film, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. Other artists, including Daria Martin, Kerstin Hamilton, Ed Atkins, Robert Boyd, Ersa Ersen, Harun Farocki, Daria Martin, Santiago Mostyn, Ursula Mayer, Adrian Paci, Frances Stark, Superflex, and Ryan Trecartin, look at the state of 21st century humanity from multitudinous angles and approaches.
Each of the featured artists nevertheless investigate these issues with creative foresight. They consider the effects of our digital word—a world of AI, drones, and self-generating technologies—on our own abilities to cope with the complex and confounding conditions of what the show calls, "a global warzone of religious fanaticism and political extremism." "In times of such rapid change, pause and reflection become increasingly important," says curator Joa Ljungberg in the show's press release. "The artists participating in THE NEW HUMAN strive to understand how new developments change our lives and in what direction we might be moving."
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