Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006, video still. Image courtesy of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Exhibitions
Harun Farocki
one image doesn't take the place of the previous one
Historical Feature and R. Fraser Elliott Galleries
1 November - 1 February
This exhibition brings together six installations by renowned German filmmaker Harun Farocki, several of which are being presented in North America for the first time. The presentation of Farocki's filmic montages in the gallery, where documentary visuals are subtly accompanied by spoken commentary, allows for incisive investigation of the image, its demands and its profound implications for the conditions of existence and of production today. This spatial deployment - one with multiple vectors - provokes a new relationship with the temporality and the conceptual framework at play in his films. In Section (Schnittstelle), Farocki's first installation, he describes and reflects upon his manner of working at the editing table where image and text, inseparable elements, cross one another. Section is accompanied by four other installations: Eye/Machine III (2003); Counter Music (2004); Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) and Dubbing (2006). In addition, the 16mm film Inextinguishable Fire (1969), in which he stakes out the territory of his filmic investigations, will be screened.
Harun Farocki was born in Neutitschein, in German-annexed Czechoslovakia, in 1944. Since graduating from Berlin's Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in 1966, he has directed more than 90 films, including feature films, documentaries and television programs. His films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2004, and the Vienna Filmmuseum in 2006. He has participated in important international events such as the Carnegie International (2005) and documenta 12 (2007). He has held many teaching posts, and between 1993 and 1999 taught at the University of California Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been Visiting Professor at Vienna's Akademie für Bildende Künste. Harun Farocki is a media theorist and writer, and was the editor of the influential German film journal Filmkritik from 1974 to 1984. He lives and works in Berlin.
Harun Farocki: "one image doesn't take the place of the previous one" will be accompanied by a 215-page catalogue edited by Michèle Thériault with contributions by Harun Farocki, Rembert Huser, Volker Pantenburg, Michèle Thériault and David Tomas, a joint publication of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
This exhibition is curated by Michèle Thériault, and organized and circulated by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Presentation is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund (Queen's University), the Kingston Arts Council and the City of Kingston.