Duty Free Art is a new lecture commissioned by Artists Space and presented for the first time preceding the opening reception of Steyerl's survey exhibition. It builds a thread of connections between leaked emails from Syrian government accounts and the growing phenomenon of the "freeport" storage facilities where millions of dollars of artworks are held without incurring taxes. As concentrated sites of the dialectics apparent in Steyerl's films and writing, her lectures articulate the notion of the artist as performing image, as producer and as circulator. Steyerl has coined the term "circulationism" in order to describe a state that is "not about the art of making an image, but about post-producing, launching, and accelerating it."

Hito Steyerl studied documentary filmmaking, and her essay films of the 1990s address issues of migration, multiculturalism and globalization in the aftermath of the formation of the European Union. Her films November (2004) and Lovely Andrea (2007) mark a move towards the extrapolation of the essay form as an open-ended means of speculation. They locate representations of herself and her friend Andrea Wolf as object lessons in the politics played out within the translation and migration of image documents. Steyerl’s prolific filmmaking and writing has since occupied a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have increasingly addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals, often online.

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