ART-PRESENTATION: Harun Farocki-Reality Would Have to Begin

As a director, screenwriter, author, Harun Farocki created a cinematographic and artistic oeuvre, difficult to frame in a single genre, as it includes documentary film, film essay and video art and media installation, adapted to the variety of topics that he approached. From films made for the German television to feature films screened at major international festivals, later, to installations specifically designed for artistic venues, Farocki’s creation simultaneously maps a self-referential and self-reflexive level of the film, constantly bringing the dialogue between image and image into a close-up.

By Dimitris Lempesis

The exhibition “Reality Would Have to Begin” is a selection of Harun Farocki’s films, videos and installations created between 1980s and 2014, part of them in collaboration with the artist and director Antje Ehmann, with whom he’d been working since the early 2000s. The focal point of the exhibition is that it reveals not only the various codes which program and condition the visual field from which the author extracts his images, but also the way in which montage is used as a thinking tool. Montage, as Farocki understood it, often takes the form of linguistic analogies, niches simultaneously dividing the images and bringing them together, indexical gestures, a metaphor for ‘transfer’.  The title of the exhibition was inspired by Harun Farocki’s 1988 essay of the same title, translated into English in 1992, and which served for the basis of the film “Images of the World and the Inscription of War”. This title suggests a turning point, a gesture that could bring about a change in an unbearable situation. Specifically, these words are a call to block access to nuclear weapons, and they recall a statement by the philosopher Günther Anders which highlights the failure of the Allies to bomb the access to the Auschwitz camp and to stop further crimes in World War II. To understand what is present but cannot be seen, reality needs to begin.

A section of this exhibition focuses on multi-channel video installations which make up an ‘archive of filmic expressions’ (as Farocki called it) or a ‘film dictionary’ based on film history excerpts, found footage, and the method of joining up these fragments through soft-montage. The starting point, the two-channel video “Interface” (1995), is the filmmaker’s most important ars poetica and it represents the turning point in terms of how the ‘image comments upon the image’. The video installation “War Tropes” (2011) was created together with Antje Ehmann from fragments of known war films, decontextualized and rearranged according to the iconological project showed in the first video—horizontality and simultaneity—and this comes back to one of the leitmotifs in Farocki’s work, the war, which, here, is reconstructed and classified in specific gestures. The short video “Synchronisation” (2006), co-authored by Antje Ehmann, adds another layer to the question of the signifiers embedded in the film, and the seven-language dubbing of the famous “Taxi Driver” mirror scene casts doubts over the sincerity of the character’ speech.

Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to the film essays about the visual history of Nazi concentration camps and the politics of a new visual typology generated by data banks and image archives, containing ‘more images than the eye can see’. The failure to understand what was recorded by the surveillance cameras and those of the military’s guided missiles in their fly-overs is shown in the film “Images of the World and the Inscription of War” (1988) through the wide visual resources which are deciphered by the author in relation to photographs taken by the SS, but also in relation to other cultural references. One of the key elements of the author’s reasoning is camouflage: the makeup of women who advertise beauty products, the veil of the Algerian women, or the water laboratory in Hanover. Aerial military photographs and their scientific filtering through a series of analytical parameters stand in the way of sight despite the amount of information available, turning the observer either into an accomplice or a victim. In relation to this film-essay, “Respite”  (2007) starts from black and white footage found by the author, depicting the Westerbork transit camp, originally a camp for refugees from Nazi Germany, which was transformed into a transit and detention camp after Germany occupied the Netherlands. Here Farocki linked the images of the inmates’ daily chores to informational inserts that typically announced the horrors that would follow. As a counterpoint to these two films, “Transmission” (2007) is a video that serves as a catalogue of ritual gestures through which the visitors’ hands evoke traces of the history written in the commemorative monuments they visit.

The third thematic section of the exhibition follows another recurrent theme of Farocki’s creation: labor as reflected in the mutations suffered and their valorization or representation in a social-political context. The extensive project which began in 2011 as a co-creation with Antje Ehmann, “Labour in a Single Shot”, is presented here in a compressed formula of 5 excerpts from the video archive which includes workshops of the two authors in about 20 countries around the world. This video series started from observing various, repetitive, often invisible kinds of labor which highlighted both the physical toil and the perception of it, as well as the possibility of weaving a narrative around the accumulation of those 1- to 2-minute uncut filmed sequences. The two authors inquire about what was hidden or even unimaginable in the labor images that they show; which types of labor were mostly found in the city center, and which ones at the outskirts; what was typical to the labor field or, on the contrary, the unusual ones in every city? Another video material, “In-Formation” (2005), approaches the history of migration in Germany and the history of its visual representation in school textbooks, newspapers and other publications, critically filtering out the inability of graphic symbols and charts to represent the migration phenomenon, and to justly reflect the reality.

Info: Curator: Diana Marincu, Art Encounters Foundation Timișoara, 46C Take Ionescu Blvd., Timișoara, Duration: 1-31/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-17:00 (by appointment only, scheduled online here), https://artencounters.ro