Harun Farocki
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Organiza: Fundación Proa
Auspicia: Tenaris - Organización Techint
2 de Febrero - 7 de Abril  2013 

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Starting on Saturday, February 2, 2013, Fundación Proa and the Goethe-Institut are presenting the first solo exhibition of artist Harun Farocki in Argentina. Entitled Harun Farocki, the show consists of five video installations produced from 2002 to 2012 and a film series with premier screenings of his last three productions. The exhibition provides an overview of Farocki’s complex conceptual universe, which revolves around uncovering the ideological processes that the production and reception of images entail. In March, Farocki will visit Buenos Aires to give a workshop at the Universidad del Cine and to present his most recent book of essays, Desconfiar de las imágenes [Distrust of Images, Caja Negra Editora]. He will also give a public interview on his audiovisual work at the Proa auditorium.

Organized by the Goethe-Institut Buenos Aires and Fundación Proa, Harun Farocki is sponsored by Tenaris–Organización Techint.

Harun Farocki (Germany, 1944) is considered one of the most radical artists active today. His work revolves around an analysis of the audiovisual representations and images produced by contemporary society. In more than one hundred films, productions for television, videos, installations and essays, Farocki has attempted to reveal the forms of power involved in the production, register and consumption of images from the beginning of film history through video games and virtual reality. Farocki the narrator disappears behind images; rather than explain, he makes visible that which the image conceals.

The exhibition presents five installations that Farocki has made in the last decade. In gallery one, the work Eye / Machine II (2002, 15 min.) makes use of a vast repertoire of historical and current images of war, as well as images recorded by cameras installed in missiles, and video simulations. Presented in two synchronized videos, the virtual images as well as the images recorded on the battlefield throughout history interrogate their own power in constructing and waging war.

Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006, 36 min.), The Silver and the Cross (2010, 17 min.) and Parallel (2012, 17 min.) are on exhibit in gallery two.

Workers…, one of Farocki’s most emblematic works, consists of twelve screens that show different representations of workers throughout the history of film. The theme is always the same: scenes of workers leaving the factory. The question of work is also present in The Silver and the Cross, in which Farocki minutely examines a painting by Gaspar Miguel de Berrío from 1758 that depicts silver being removed from a mine in Potosí. The film compares living conditions in Potosí in the 18th century and the city today. Parallel—Farocki’s most recent video installation—is an essay on the status of computer-animated images. If film and photography interrogated the possibility of representing reality, are digitally generated images capable of surpassing “reality” itself?

Serious Games III: Immersion (2009, 20 min.), the work in the exhibition’s final gallery, shows a research center dedicated to treating soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress due to the war in Iraq. The patients recreate the extreme situations they experienced using computer-generated images. Immersion ultimately questions the possibility of recreating and even replacing images from memory by means of virtual-reality technologies.

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