South likes: Harun Farocki at MUAC, Mexico City

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Harun Farocki, Workers leaving the factory, 2006. Courtesy of the artist

South likes: Harun Farocki at MUAC, Mexico City
Visión. Producción. Opresión
MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico
2 February – 15 June, 2014

With a long career in film, video art and film criticism, Harun Farocki suggests a powerful conjunction between the filmic medium and contemporary art, emphasizing the ideological capacity of images. His work, using a wide range of media, constitutes a critical element through the medium of and about cinema, which addresses political questions and analyses war, economics and politics.
Under the title Vision. Production. Oppression, the exhibition presented at the Museum of the National University of Mexico – MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contamporaneo) constitutes an overview of Farocki’s video installations. Besides being a retrospective of his work, the show is an investigation of his artistic strategies and the conditions of production of the audiovisual image, which is portrayed as a cultural artifact interwoven with power. The video Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006), owes its title to  Lumière’s “La sortie des usines”, often considered as the first motion picture ever made. The film, which represents the moment of workers leaving the factory, is displayed on twelve monitors simultaneously and entertains the idea of workers as social group through different cinematographic perceptions and concepts. Here Farocki uses selection, comparison and analogy to show a predictable social development and the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial work and also how video became a narrative medium with a specific ideological significance.
In parallel, the project Labour in a Single Shot by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, which was held in 8 cities around the world from 2011 to 2014, comes to an end with a presentation and a workshop by the artists. In the attempt to document contemporary working conditions in a range of different contexts through a series of videos, the artists raise the question: “How one can film the choreography of a workflow in a single shot in the most interesting way?”

Klea Charitou

http://www.muac.unam.mx/webpage/ver_exposicion.php?id_exposicion=78

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Harun Farocki, The Silver and the Cross, 2010. Courtesy of the artist

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Harun Farocki, Serious Games III: Immersion, 2009. Courtesy of the artist

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Harun Farocki, Visión. Producción. Opresión, installation shot, 2014

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Harun Farocki, Visión. Producción. Opresión, installation shot, 2014

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Harun Farocki, Visión. Producción. Opresión, installation shot, 2014

 

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