As a director, screenwriter, artist and author, Harun Farocki (1944–2014)
created an impressive body of work, including over 100 films, which defy
categorization in a single genre: films made for the German television, feature
films screened at major international festivals, later, to installations specifically
designed for artistic venues and exhibited worldwide. He is known for his
unique voice and experimental approach to the image and montage—constantly
bringing the dialogue between image and image into a close-up—as well as for
the way he formulates a critical discourse on history and social realities which
he analyses meticulously by linking the political to the visual.
The exhibition Reality Would Have to Begin at the Art Encounters Foundation
in Timișoara presents a large selection of Harun Farocki's films, videos and
installations created from the 1980s to 2014, part of them in collaboration with
the artist and director Antje Ehmann (b. 1968), with whom he’d been working
since the early 2000s. A section of this exhibition focuses on his multi-channel
video installations which make up an "archive of filmic expressions" (as Farocki
called it) based on excerpts from the film history, found footage, and the method
of pairing these fragments through soft-montage. Another part of the exhibition
is dedicated to the film essays about the traces and history of Nazi concentration
camps and the politics of a new visual typology generated by data banks and
operative image archives, containing "more images than the eye can see". The
third thematic section of the exhibition follows another recurrent theme of
Farocki’s work: labor as reflected in a social-political context.
The title Reality Would Have to Begin was inspired by Harun Farocki's 1988
essay of the same title, translated into English in 1992, and which served as the
basis of the film Images of the World and the Inscription of War [ Bilder der
Welt und Inschrift des Krieges ]. This title suggests a turning point, a movement
towards changing 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 would have to begin.
The exhibition Harun Farocki – Reality Would Have to Begin is organized by
Art Encounters Foundation and the German Cultural Center Timișoara, with the
kind support of Goethe Institut, Harun Farocki GbR and Neuer Berliner
Kunstverein.
A considerable number of works will be presented for the first time in Romania
in a major exhibition dedicated to Harun Farocki. The program related to the
exhibition will include several other events, encouraging the public to fully
immerse in Farocki’s fascinating filmmaking, such as the launch of the
Romanian translation of the autobiography Harun Farocki: Ten, Twenty, Thirty,
Forty , edited by Antje Ehmann and Marius Babias, published by IDEA Design
& Print Cluj and the screening of the film In Comparison followed by a debate,
as part of the Timișoara Architecture Biennial – BETA 2020 program.
Curated by Diana Marincu (Assistant curator Georgia Țidorescu)
Courtesy of the artist and Art Encounters Foundation
Photocredit infi.ro