Harun Farocki – Reality Would Have to Begin

About

The present exhibition is a selection of Harun Farocki’s films, videos and installations created between 1980s and 2014, part of them in collaboration with the artist and director Antje Ehmann (b. 1968), with whom he’d been working since the early 2000s. The focal point of the exhibition is that it reveals not only the various codes which program and condition the visual field from which the author extracts his images, but also the way in which montage is used as a thinking tool. Montage, as Farocki understood it, often takes the form of linguistic analogies, niches simultaneously dividing the images and bringing them together, indexical gestures, a metaphor for ‘transfer’. The image and the counter image undergo repetition, reassessment, balance, or mutual complement, and the viewer’s imagination infuses them with their coherent political realities.

The title of the exhibition was inspired by Harun Farocki’s 1988 essay of the same title, translated into English in 1992, and which served for the basis of the film Images of the World and the Inscription of War [Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges]. This title suggests a turning point, a gesture that could bring about a change in an unbearable situation. Specifically, these words are a call to block access to nuclear weapons, and they recall a statement by the philosopher Günther Anders which highlights the failure of the Allies to bomb the access to the Auschwitz camp and to stop further crimes in World War II. To understand what is present but cannot be seen, reality would have to begin.