Artistic directors: Marius Babias and Antje Ehmann

Curators: Antonia Alampi, Carles Guerra, Tom Holert, Doreen Mende, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Volker Pantenburg and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Harun Farocki (1944-2014) is one of the most important and internationally influential German filmmakers. His oeuvre comprises more than 100 experimental and documentary films, essay, short and feature films. However, his complete oeuvre goes far beyond that. Farocki left behind extensive works of film and media theory, still to be discovered, and for decades worked as a lecturer. Since the mid-1990s, he expanded his cinematic practice with video installations in fine art spaces. Farocki was an ethnographer of capitalist living environments, which he dissected and analyzed. Vital to his approach and his oeuvre is the examination of the meaning of images, their genesis, and, in particular, the power structures inscribed in them. In order to pay tribute to the significant oeuvre of Harun Farocki, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), in cooperation with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, the Harun Farocki Institute, Harun Farocki GbR, Savvy Contemporary and Silent Green Kulturquartier, initiated the first comprehensive retrospective of Farocki’s work.

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein is showing the exhibition Harun Farocki: Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means, which assembles his film installation works. Simultaneously the first retrospective of Harun Farocki´s complete cinematographic work takes place at the Arsenal Cinema. Dedicated to the question about the influence and permanence of Farocki’s aesthetic and intellectual practice is the event Farocki Now: A Temporary Academy, organized by the Harun Farocki Institute, taking place on several days at Silent Green Kulturquartier, with an opening event at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Savvy Contemporary develops the group exhibition El Usman Faroqhi Here and a Yonder – On Finding Poise in Disorientation, with Candice Breitz, Ariani Darmawan, Fehras Publishing Practices, Shilpa Gupta, Ho Tzu Nyen, Samson Kambalu, Olaf Nicolai, and Michael Zheng. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne publishes a multi-volume edition of the writings by Harun Farocki, the first volume being the previously unpublished autobiography. The Harun Farocki Retrospective is accompanied by an extensive lecture program and the educational programs “Großes Kino, Kleines Kino” and “Arsenal Filmatelier”.

The exhibition Harun Farocki: Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means

at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

The exhibition Harun Farocki: Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) combines works by Harun Farocki, which deal with the logic of cinema – films are quoted and their visual languages are analyzed. For instance, On Construction of Griffith’s Films (2006) deals with the montage principles of the early films by D. W. Griffith, whereas the 6-channel video installation Feasting or Flying (2008) examines the motif of male suicide in fictional film. The 5-channel video installation War Tropes (2011), however, brings together key motifs of the war film genre, and Dubbing (2006) is dedicated to the effects of the translation of films. In the predominantly multi-channel installations “soft montage” is used, which is key to Farocki’s work: the images are assembled not only in succession, but also in juxtaposition. The “soft montage” is also transferred to the exhibition space where the works are not shown separately in black boxes, but in a way that allows it to look at them together and in comparison.

Apart from the analysis of the film images, another motif is central to the works shown at n.b.k.: iteration, the images iterating within the works and in the exhibition. This principle is demonstrated in particular by the work Re-Pouring (2010). This work, which deals with automated work processes that Farocki repeatedly addressed in his oeuvre, illustrates especially the concept of iteration in the context of the exhibition – quasi an allegory of the functioning of images in the greater part of Harun Farocki’s oeuvre. Presented in the entrance area, it is the only work in the exhibition not to quote cinema, but it attempts to stage a Fluxus performance by Tomas Schmit from 1963 under today’s conditions, in this case by means of a robot. Beyond that, the exhibition will be completed by documentary material and Harun Farocki’s radio feature So long good-bye (1978).

Harun Farocki: Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means is not only part of the comprehensive Harun Farocki Retrospektive, but also the third part in a series of exhibitions conceived by Antje Ehmann and Carles Guerra. 2016 already saw the two exhibitions Harun Farocki. What is at Stake at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (January 20 – May 22, 2016) and Harun Farocki. Empathy (June 2 – October 16, 2016) at Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. With this series, Ehmann and Guerra continually explore the importance of Harun Farocki’s oeuvre and examine the many implications of his works.

Publication

Harun Farocki’s writings will be published in several volumes by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, edited by Marius Babias, Antje Ehmann, Tom Holert, Doreen Mende, and Volker Pantenburg.