Abstract

Abstract 2012 is a return to the contested narrative of Andrea Wolfs death with Steyerl traveling to Kurdistan in search of information about her friends murder The work links cinematic shooting and military warfare together implicating Germanys role in the operation This has been screened in the past as a dualchannel work But in this case it has been repurposed by the artist as a split screen film KG From eflux Abstract presents a scenario in which the violence of warfare and the violence of aesthetics twist around each other The twochannel video visits the site where Steyerls friend Andrea Wolf was killed in 1998 but through a prism that refracts cinematic language against the weapons that killed her friend As the site and circumstances of her death fold into the act of witnessing it from a distance the ethical burden of identifying those responsible also appears to live and die with the debris that still remains at the site of the helicopter attack