Hito Steyerl. Mechanical Kurds

The MACRO museum presents for the first time in Italy the work by Hito Steyerl, now regarded as one of the most important voices in contemporary art. Commissioned in 2025 by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the New Museum in New York, this is the latest chapter in the German artist, filmmaker and theorist’s ongoing research into the global relationship between images and power.

By combining immersive spatial elements and a single-channel video, Mechanical Kurds reflects on the relationships between digital labor, artificial intelligence, geopolitical conflicts and image production, revealing invisible bodies, territories and conflicts, as well as the political violence concealed behind images and algorithms, and offering an alternative perspective on reality. The title refers to the “Mechanical Turk”, an 18th-century automaton in Ottoman dress capable of defeating any opponent at chess, which in reality concealed a human operator inside. In the early 2000s, Amazon adopted the automaton’s name for its crowdsourcing platform, which allows companies to outsource tasks, such as AI training, to digital workers.

Amidst a mix of documentary and AI-generated imagery, Steyerl’s work features the voices of three Syrian-Kurdish refugees in the Domiz camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, revealing the system of “ghost workers” who classify images using so-called bounding boxes – framing tools essential for teaching AI systems to identify and recognise distinct elements. The connection between images and political violence unfolds in a circular narrative in which these same workers become targets of automated drones during attacks carried out by Turkey in the region as part of its anti-Kurdish offensive. In the artist’s investigation, political conflicts themselves become exploitable resources, both geographically and in human terms, for major technology corporations.