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* Harun Farocki
Tate Modern London 13 November to 6 December
Raven Row London 19 November to 7 February
For more than 40 years, the Berlin-based film and video artist, critic and lecturer Harun Farocki has meticulously investigated found images. From early silent film of factory workers to images of war and, more recently, surveillance footage taken in prisons and job centres, Farocki works like a forensic scientist, analysing the same material time and again. In doing so, he demands that the viewer also revisits the footage repeatedly to reinterpret its meaning. Farocki 's approach reveals capitalism's calculated devotion to survey, discipline and coerce the citizen, whether within the terrors of war or the confines of a prison yard or a shopping mall.
The title of the recent London show curated by Alex Sainsbury, 'Harun Farocki. Against What? Against Whom?', challenges us to question the filmmaker's motivation. Historically, the title could be understood to refer to his anti-war and anti-capitalist political engagement or his allusion to modernist formalist, anti-narrative practices. A more contemporary reading may suggest that Farocki redeploys spectacles of visual culture in his work 'against' themselves.
In his practice, Farocki re-presents these recycled images to reveal how 20th-century institutions of power sought to control, restrict and manipulate the human subject. The footage he reworks originates from the very institutions he analyses, and so offers an insightful critique of contemporary and historical hegemonies of power.
The long overdue retrospective of screenings at Tate Modern and installations at Raven Row in London invite us to...