Hito Steyerl's 'Mechanical Kurds' at Villa Arson, Nice

From February 20 to May 31, 2026, Villa Arson presents Hito Steyerl's video installation 'Mechanical Kurds' (2025). The work blends documentary, fiction, and critical speculation to examine invisible micro-labor chains and the geopolitics of images behind autonomous technologies. Steyerl reactivates the figure of the 'Mechanical Turk'—an 18th-century chess-playing automaton operated by a human—linking it to Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform for global on-demand micro-tasks. The film features testimonies from click-workers in Iraqi Kurdistan refugee camps who train AI by labeling images. The installation incorporates documentary footage, computer-generated sequences, synthetic voices, and data flows, with sculptural elements inspired by labeling systems. Curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi, the work critiques the digital economy and automated warfare, highlighting exploitation, surveillance, and dispossession. Steyerl, born in Germany in 1966 and based in Berlin, holds a PhD in philosophy and is known for analyzing digital capitalism's invisible infrastructures.