The Dortmunder U always comes across as an odd mix of an student art venue, a classic museum and a municipal institution. I can see how any two of the three could go well together. Yet, divided by multiple floors, in the Dortmunder U they just coexist.
Skipping the Museum Ostwall we would only visit the digital human rights exhibition ‘Whistleblower & Vigilanten‘ and pop in to Hito Steyrl’s installation a couple of floors up.
Hito Steyrl
The ‘Holodeck’ room of the Dortmunder U features a video installation of Hito Steyrl. Large statements over gold suited, sunglassed theatrics on a backdrop of shiny 3D spheres, five minutes into which I got the feeling that this was somehow very familiar yet somehow displaced.
It took me a while to realise that it was more anachronicity than displacement. The holodeck had sent me back to a world of computer generated art from the nineties, only rendered on more powerful computers.
Whistleblower & Vigilanten
The exhibition “Whistleblowers and Vigilantes. Figures of Digital Resistance” asks what links hacktivists, whistleblowers and (Internet) vigilantes. What is the legal understanding of these different actors? Do they share certain conceptions? Who speaks and acts for whom and in the name of which (higher) right?
– hkmv.de
The establishment response towards whistleblowers has always been spreading doubt and placing them squarely in the conspiracy theorists domain. This exhibition is no different in that it gives no clues to indicate the distinction.
what | Dortmunder U
where | Dortmund
who | Hito Steyrl