Hito Steyerl MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE, 2019
with Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze and Miloš Trakilović.
3 channel HD video (color, sound), environment
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE is a collaborative lecture work between Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze and Miloš Trakilović. It was conceived in 2019 for Steyerl’s second solo exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). The film looks at various fashion labels – Balenciaga, Vetements – and contrasts their rise to fame with certain political events: the spread of neoliberalism in the former Eastern Bloc countries and the manipulation of presidential elections in the United States. The untypical comparison allows Steyerl and her collaborators to draw insights about how online-collected fashion data can be used for political advertising and audience targeting, and how high-fashion designers appropriated aesthetics of lower-income population living in the societies characterized by extreme economic inequality.
