Harun Farocki - The Art Newspaper

Dates: 13 Nov 09 - 6 Dec 09
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Bankside Power Station, 25 Sumner Street London SE1
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The German film-maker Harun Farocki turned to making films for two or more screens in the mid-1990s, works that moved him from the realm of cinema to that of art galleries. Farocki’s so-called “essay films” use found footage to highlight the variance between an “official” version of historical events as portrayed in the media, and that of real life, reflecting on the way that society uses photographs and the moving image. Raven Row and Tate Modern have come together to present work from throughout Farocki’s career in the most comprehensive showing of his work in the UK. His single-screen films made for the cinema, dating from the 1960s, are screened in Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium, curated by Stuart Comer, Antje Ehmann and the Otolith Group, while one six-screen work and eight multi-screen installations made since 1995 show at the Raven Row gallery. Farocki, born in Czechoslovakia in 1944 in the then German annexed town of Novy Jicín, rose from the politicised environment of German film-making in the 1960s, and represents the shift of the moving image from cinema to gallery. The Tate is screening more than 20 films including two of his most significant works, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988, and Videograms of a Revolution, 1992, about the Romanian revolution, which, Comer says, explores “the way media culture influences how we see history and how we see war, and how war even determines history through media images”. The Tate also hosts interviews with Farocki and discussions about his work. “An analysis and understanding of editing is something that Farocki applies to all his work,” said Raven Row director Alex Sainsbury. “It drove him to work on two screens to allow what he calls ‘simultaneity’ as well as succession, so that two images could comment on one another and cross over. He is extremely interested in the way that images are used and how we are made to read them in particular ways.” A 12-screen work showing at Ravens Row, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006, consists of found footage showing factory workers through the ages heading for home at the end of their shift. The work is also a history of cinema, as it features Louis Lumière’s La Sortie des Usines Lumière, 1895, a short, silent test film of employees leaving the Lumière factory, considered to be the first motion picture ever to be made. For his newest work, Immersion, 2009, Farocki filmed victims of the Iraq war undergoing therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. A catalogue is published by Koenig Books to coincide with the Raven Row show.

Louis Lumière’s La Sortie des Usines Lumière, 1895