For the outside screening, I decided to go the media collection at MOMA. In the second floor, tucked away in a corner from the bigger exhibitions is a screen with a few small benches. Screening in this corner is “November” by Hito Steyerl. The piece is a compilation of personal footage taken by Hito, interviews, and stock footage from Bruce Lee movies and Kurdish television. This combination of material blurs the line between what is true and what is fictional. The artist has refused to call her piece a documentary. Rather, it is a portrait of her deceased friend by associated her with different images of uprisings and revolutions.
Hito Steyerl starts her piece in these words, “My best friend when I was 17, was a girl called Andrea Wolf. She died 4 years ago, when she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist.” She goes on to show us a home video that she made with Andrea on her Super- 8. It is a Kung- Fu action film with strong feminist themes. Andrea plays the hero that gets to beat up every male in site. In voice over, Steyerl explains that in this world, only bad guys have weapons and only the hero uses their fists to fight.
The film was made when Hito Steyerl was very young. She made it with her friends without any particular intention. It is only after the death of Andrea Wolf that the piece took on a meaning. Andrea was killed by the Turkish army after she join a Kurdish army of women. Shortly after her death, she became a symbol of revolution. It is after this that the silly and tacky Kung- Fu video became a symbol of rebellion. With this perspective, Hito Steryl dissects her amateur video through the eyes of war.
It is interesting that something we create at an innocent age, something that we may not have thought much about after creating it can obtain a different meaning. To Hito, the video that she made with her friend meant freedom and justice after her death. These shifting meanings made me think about videos and artwork that I made when I was younger. It made me think about the possible ways in which I can interpret these pieces looking back after so many years and how the way I look at it defines me. I remember talking to an artist a few months back that spoke about the meaning of her art. She told me that after she finishes painting her piece, it doesn’t matter what her intentions were in the beginning. Different people in different generations will look at it in different ways.
Hito Steyerl redefined her film with her friend by associating it with the fighting mentality found in old- school Kung Fu featuring Bruce Lee and images of revolution taken from Kurdish documentaries.