Client: Museum Ostwall, Dortmund

FLOWERS! Flowers in 20th and 21st Century Art

With 180 works by almost 50 artists*, the exhibition “FLOWERS! Flowers in 20th and 21st Century Art” offers a comprehensive overview of the motif of the flower in the art of the past and present century. The multi-channel video environment “Power Plants” by Hito Steyerl from 2019, set up by 235 Media in the Dortmunder U, is an example of the media-artistic further development of a theme that has inspired artists since the Baroque period until today.

The environment developed by Hito Steyerl consists of 18 LED video modules in different sizes from 50 x 100 cm to 100 x 200 cm and 18 LED text modules arranged in three steel frames. Each monitor-text unit is a “power plant” video sculpture created by neural networks. They form a virtual garden consisting of plants with ecological, medical and political powers. Here Hito Steyerl connects the concept of ruderal vegetation (from the Latin rudus ‘debris’), which sets itself up on fallow or devastated land that has been overused or kept free of vegetation, with the automated systems of reproduction and distribution of images and their effects on political systems that she has studied many times.