Red Alert

Formed in the world of documentary – cinéma-vérité par excellence – Hito Steyerl seeks the limit point of the medium, where representation verges on abstraction. The red here is polysemic – a citation from the triptych Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color that Rodchenko believed marked “the end of painting”, it also refers to the public warning of an imminent danger of terrorist attack. In sounding a Red Alert, Steyerl seeks to recover the symbolic urgency of a signal that was once an icon of abstraction while also bearing an ineradicable trace of the sacred.