Section: Retrospective of Harun Farocki's Films About this section

After three years of combined efforts and hard work, we have managed to organize the first comprehensive Harun Farocki exhibition and film retrospective in Poland. Thanks to the extraordinary and unprecedented collaboration of four leading institution devoted to film, visual art and the promotion of intercultural dialogue: PLANETE+ DOC FILM FESTIVAL, Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Goethe-Institut and Okonakino Foundation, we are lucky enough to have one of the most encompassing presentations of this German artist’s work.
The exhibition entitled “Harun Farocki. For the First Time In Warsaw” consists of eight fascinating and spectacular installations. They include the Polish premiere of his latest work, “War Tropes”, which has previously been exhibited only in Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater November 2011. In conjunction with a film retrospective and publication of theoretical texts on Harun Farocki’s oeuvre, the presentation also showcases his intense visual world simultaneously giving access to a historical cross-section of his work as well as areas of his interests.
Harun Farocki is one of the most inquisitive artists examining the nature and function of the image in contemporary culture. What distinguishes Farocki’s style is the form of his art and the process of presentation which begins with showing a highly complicated treatment of an issue and concludes by revealing its simplicity – if not banality. Through film and logic, the artist lets his audience discover the lowest common denominator of the most important issues at the boundaries of the world of culture, its products and its politics. He strives to show them naked, simple, demythologised, representing a highly original approach in art. Farocki is particularly interested in the process of the production and changes to images of concepts and events. According to the artist, the means of expression have become a weapon in the 21st century - metaphorically and literally, as he analyses the use of onboard cameras on smart missiles. Farocki’s films and film installations “enlighten” as to the functioning of a system that looks but doesn’t see. The semantics of concepts which influence the “image” of the image in culture is an important point of departure in Farocki’s analysis. The German expression “Aufklärung” (“enlightenment”) is also used in military and police investigatory terminology, which we learn about in Farocki’s 1988 film “Images Of the World and the Inscription Of War”, which opens the film retrospective of the artist. In examining reality, Farocki uses images it produces as one can see in the largest installation presented in the exhibition – “Deep Play”, where television footage from the FIFA World Cup final game broadcast was used to create a new narration on image itself as well as technology used to its recording and analysis.
Farocki’s films and installations assume a new significance from the perspective of 2012. They remain relevant and inspiring, offering audiences a conscious journey through the world of the contemporary ideas which try to “enlighten” us.

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