Hito SteyerlMechanical Kurds
Apr 29 – Nov 1, 2026 Salario
Hito Steyerl’s video installation on the Kurdish refugees who label images to train artificial intelligence, shown for the first time in Italy.
Commissioned in 2025 by the Jeu de Paume and the New Museum, the single-channel video plays in an installation that borrows the bounding boxes of machine vision, cutting between footage from the Domiz refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan and AI-generated images. Three Syrian Kurdish refugees describe their work tagging images; in the film the same workers become targets of Turkish drone strikes. The title recalls the 18th-century chess automaton known as the Mechanical Turk, whose name Amazon gave to its crowdsourcing platform. Curated by Alice Labor.
Museum Salario
