Harun Farocki. First Time in Warsaw

One of the most important events at this year’s PLANETE+ DOC will be an exhibition of eight video installations by Harun Farocki entitled Harun Farocki for the First Time in Warsaw that will be held between May 12 and August 19 in the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. The exhibition’s highlight will be a 12-channel installation employing TV footage from the 2006 World Cup soccer finals. Other presented works will include pieces from “Serious Games” series, referring to the use of computer simulations in US military training, as well as “Rhetorics of War” which employs found footage to conduct an analysis of the way military conflicts are portrayed on film.

The exhibition is supplemented by a retrospective showcasing Harun Farocki’s 14 films, which will be screened between May 12 and 20 in Kinoteka and KINO.LAB movie theaters in Warsaw. Screening of Images of the World and Inscription of the War (1988) will open the retrospective. During the festival, Harun Farocki will attend Q&A sessions with the audience following the retrospective’s opening screening as well as after the screenings of Workers Leaving the Factory (dir. Harun Farocki) and Red Line (dir. José Felipe Costa). Both screenings will be held on May 13 in Kinoteka.

Harun Farocki is a documentary filmmaker, video and installation artist, as well as film critic and theorist. Since the 1960s he has made over 100 cinema and TV films, of which 70 were documentaries. In the 1980s he was recognized as a prominent documentary filmmaker, which won him a standing invitation to the most influential film festival. Since mid-1990s he has been working in galleries and museums, employing the means of multi-channel projection. His work is inspired by classical filmmakers as well as cinema’s great experimenters. Building on the film essay genre and employing the technique of found footage Farocki has developed his own original style. Radical formal solutions and an on-going interest in urgent social and philosophical themes won Farocki acclaim as one of the most interesting artist of the past few decades.

More information about the Harun Farocki. First Time in Warsaw exhibition and film retrospecive is available at www.planetedocff.pl, www.csw.art.pl and www.goethe-institut.de/warszawa.