Harun Farocki. Empathy
1 June — 16 October 2016
- Artists
- Harun Farocki
- Curators
- Antje Ehmann and Carles Guerra
- Venue
- Museo Tàpies
- Price
- 7 €
- Tickets & register
- www.fundaciotapies.org
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The exhibition "Harun Farocki.Empathy" brings together the films and installations of an author recognised as a filmmaker, artist, critic and activist and as a seminal figure of the second half of the twentieth century.
In collaboration with the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies presents the second part of a project that revisits Farocki’s early militant films from the 1960s, as well as the video installations he produced from 1995 on. While the selection at IVAM focuses on Farocki’s research on the surveillance image, the operational image and the technologies of vision, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies will present a series of emblematic works that analyse forms of labour arising from traditional production modes as well as from the demands of capitalist production focusing on changes in labour processes and their representation in contemporary societies.
The notion of empathy, taken from a text by Harun Farocki, guides the selection of works to be presented in Barcelona. While from the 1960s on, Brecht’s distancing effect imposed a need for de-romanticization and objectivity in documentary practices, towards the end of his life Farocki questioned why the precious term “empathy” had been handed over to the enemy, i.e. to mainstream cinema and the entertainment industry. Harun Farocki called for its reconsideration and re-appropriation: for Another Kind of Empathy. We regard Farocki’s particularly patient and non-judgmental use of the camera as a tool for filming people at work and work spaces without interference or manipulation as a precious proof of his empathic skills. Complementing this selection of works driven by Harun Farocki’s interest in the world of labour, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies will present, for the first time in Spain, Farocki’s final long-term project, realized together with Antje Ehmann: Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit / Labour in a Single Shot.
From 2011 to 2014, Farocki and Ehmann conducted workshops with filmmakers and artists in 15 cities all over the world. Taken together, these workshops produced more than 400 one- to two-minute long films on the subject of labour. The exhibition on view at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies includes a selection of fifty-four films from nine cities. These short single-shot films exemplify the manifold kinds of labour that co-exist in the world today: material or immaterial labour, paid or unpaid work, occupations traditional or novel. The chosen works by Harun Farocki as well as the films selected from Labour in a Single Shot reveal that cinematic scenarios can be found wherever a pedagogy of the image exists. They are founded on the assumption that an image is never innocent, but rather part of a historically changing visual culture and its image regimes.
Three film programs that focus on different aspects of Harun Farocki’s film oeuvre – “Image Critique”, “Working with Words” and “Other Cultural Producers” – will give visitors the opportunity to delve deeply into Harun Farocki’s work. The films will be shown in Valencia this spring, and in Barcelona and Madrid the upcoming autumn.
Antje Ehmann and Carles Guerra will continue the project of working with Harun’s work with a third exhibition, to be titled Harun Farocki. Materials. This show will open in autumn 2017 in the NBK exhibition space in Berlin, and will be accompanied with a complete retrospective of Harun Farocki’s films at the Berlin Arsenal Cinema.
© Fundaciò Antoni Tàpies
‘Harun Farocki. Empathy’ at Fundació Antoni Tàpies ©Lluís Bover
‘Harun Farocki. Empathy’ at Fundació Antoni Tàpies ©Lluís Bover
Harun Farocki (1944, Novy Jicin – Berlin, 2014). The work of the artist and film-maker has had a decisive influence on the history of the political film since the late 1960s. Besides over 100 productions made for television and cinema, Farocki – as long-time author and editor of the magazine Filmkritik, curator, and visiting professor in Berkeley, Harvard and Vienna – has conveyed his reflections on the relation between society, politics and the moving picture. His huge significance for the visual arts is reflected in retrospectives in institutions such as Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, the Tate Modern London, as well as in solo exhibitions at MUMOK Vienna, Jeu de Paume Paris, Museum Ludwig Cologne, Kunsthaus Bregenz and more recently at MUAC Mexico and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. His work sets out a constant research on the conditions of production of the audiovisual image, visual resources and narratives, and the subtexts contained in the production and distribution of moving images.
© http://www.harunfarocki.de/
Updated October 2021
Antje Ehmann
1968, Gelsenkirchen
Antje Ehmann is a curator, author, and artist
Curatorial projects (selection):
Harun Farocki: Who is in Charge? (with Heloisa Espada), Instituto
Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro, IMS Sao Paulo, Brazil 2018 | Harun
Farocki. What ought to be done. Life and work, (with Eunhee Kim),
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South-Korea,
2018 | Harun Farocki Retrospective (with Marius Babias), Berlin 2017 |
By other Means (with Carles Guerra), NBK, Berlin 2017 | Harun Farocki.
Empathy (with Carles Guerra), Fundació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona 2016
| Harun Farocki. What is at Stake (with Carles Guerra), Institut Valencia
d’Art Modern | Harun Farocki. 4 films from 1967-1997, Angels Gallery
Barcelona 2014
Artistic projects (selection): How shall I name what I am missing? (with
Jan Ralske), Forum Expanded 2015 | Labour in a Single Shot. A Project
together with Harun Farocki, 2011 – 2014, with Eva Stotz, since 2017 |
War Tropes, (with Harun Farocki), Gorki Theater, Berlin 2011 | Feasting
or Flying (with Harun Farocki), Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana 2009
Publications (selection):
Harun Farocki, What Ought to be Done? Work and Life (with Eunhee
Kim), Seoul 2018 | Harun Farocki, 10, 20, 30, 40. Fragment einer
Autobiographie (with Marius Babias), Berlin 2017 | Harun Farocki,
Another Kind of Empathy (with Carles Guerra), Cologne 2016 | Serious
Games. War – Media – Art (with Ralf Beil), Ostfildern 2011
Last update: November 11th, 2019
Carles Guerra
Carles Guerra is an artist, art critic and independent curator. He holds a PhD from Universitat de Barcelona. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Universitat de Barcelona and the Media Studies Department, The New School for Social Research. His most recent profile has been associated with outstanding positions in the field of cultural management, cultural policies and curatorial activities. He has been Director of Primavera Fotogràfica de Catalunya, Director of the Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Chief curator at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona MACBA and, from 2015 through 2020, Executive director at Fundació Antoni Tàpies.
On top of a vast number of monographic exhibitions devoted to individual artists such as Ahlam Shibli, Art & Language, Allan Sekula, Susan Meiselas, Harun Farocki, Oriol Vilanova and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, he has curated projects like 1979. A Monument to Radical Instants and Antoni Tàpies. Political Biography.
Last update: 16th November, 2020
