“Duty Free Art”

Duty Free Art (2015) consists of the documentation of a prerecorded lecture of Steyerl’s, in which the proliferation of free-trade zones and Freeport art storage are connected with the international art market and the Syrian Assad regime. Using WikiLeaks documents, the artist shows the Louvre, the British Museum, and architect Rem Koolhaas as implicated in the planning towards a new art institution in Syria, and considers the complexities in the relationship between the national museum and the nation state.