Duty Free Art Hito Steyerl

Public Programme Event: Tuesday 12 April, 4pm – 6pm
Talks by Matthew Galloway and ARTSPACE Director Adnan Yıldız

Presented with ARTSPACE and supported by the Jan Warburon Charitable Trust, Blue Oyster is pleased to be hosting Duty Free Art by internationally renowned artist Hito Steyerl, showing in the second space.

Duty Free Art (2014) strikes deep into art’s social function. Free-trade zones, where speculative art commodities are bought and sold invisibly and tax free, are, like civil wars, an important backbone of the international art business. Both facilitate the redistribution of public property into private hands, and are catalysts of global inequality. Furthermore, Steyerl uses WikiLeaks documents to show how the Louvre, British Museum, and star architect Rem Koolhaas served the Syrian Assad regime as museum planners and gentrifiers. She describes all of this as the top-down organised production and communication conditions of contemporary art hidden behind the art itself. Steyerl proposes a reversal of perspective to unveil one’s own reality bottom-up. (Alexander Koch, KOW)

In the front space: Matthew Galloway, The Ground Swallows You