Poetics and Politics of Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art

Hito Steyerl deals with the conditions of creation and production of images and reflects on their production and circulation, materiality and projection potential in her works. This also involves a critique of contemporary art, i.e. the system in which Steyerl herself is located with her works as a filmmaker, visual artist and theorist. The article presents the reflections of this German artist in her multi-part project Duty Free Art on the relatively recent phenomenon of duty-free warehouses for art, which produce their own politics, but also a poetics of transport and mobility. It offers a critical view on Steyerl’s practice in creating a parallel between duty free art’s concepts of mobility, immobilization, storage, infrastructure space, and global transport and her work.