"Lie," "fraud," "perpetrator," "victim," "forgery," "deception," "censorship," "deprivation of liberty," "betrayal," "violence," and, yes, "conspiracy" — these are not arbitrarily chosen expressions of everyday culture, but juridifying terms used for rhetorical weaponization in all parts of the political sphere. By FELIX REIDENBACH

This short snippet of silent 8 mm film was filmed by Ingrid Oppermann in West-Berlin, possibly close to her apartment in Kurfürstenstraße, where Harun Farocki’s The Words of the Chairman (1967) was shot.

On December 22, 1933, I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., as a first son. I spent my childhood in Washington, D.C. […]

Gerd Conradt went to see Skip Norman in North Cyprus in 2002. Their conversation focuses on Holger Meins, who, like Conradt and Skip Norman, but also Harun Farocki, Helke Sander or Hartmut Bitomsky, started to study film at DFFB in 1966.

From time to time, DFFB conducted surveys among their alumni. This one, entitled “DFFB ‘volljährig’” (DFFB “adult”) was published in 1984 at the occasion of the institution’s 18th birthday.

A letter sent by Skip Norman to Helene Schwarz, the secretary who had been at DFFB since the school's beginnings and was an important confidante for many of the students.

Skip Norman submitted this CV as part of his interdisciplinary PhD dissertation in Anthropology, Sociology, Photography and Cinema in 1984. It is entitled “An Examination of Centenary United Methodist Church using the Photograph as Artifact.”

Zora Neale Hurston emphasized the dynamics of the homogenous black community. Her creativity was rooted in the folklore of black people. As a result, there was little need to portray the white world.

Culture is the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and to generate behavior. This cultural knowledge is like a recipe for organizing the necessary ingredients for a viable social life.

Notions of ‘regulation’ or ‘control’ meet with the long-venerated dreams of automation, to naturalise as the work of algorithms, not people. By JESS HENDERSON

Contributions from individuals and communities both inside and outside of academia, in particular, from activists, artists, filmmakers, policymakers and researchers are welcome. Extended Deadline: February 15, 2021.

This idea, that the virus would only effect the other, someone somewhere far, collapsed in the following days. BY BASTARDPRODIGE

They ate more, took off again, and moved to the next tree. We walked with them. BY ISOBEL WOHL

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Organized by the Berliner Gazette at Haus der Statistik from November 7 - 28, 2020. A cooperation with HaFI.

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HaFI publications in Korean and Turkish

However, it’s okay to have Game Night once in a while, because it allows us to socialize. Using wrinkles to toggle dry light. By DEATH CLASS

A glimpse into the genesis of IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR (1988). To be released shortly, HaFI 013 can already be ordered at Motto Books.

Organized by the Berliner Gazette, the Winter School “Silent Works” investigates possibilities for re-inventing ‘the school’ along the lines of ‘the factory.’ 

... regarding aerial reconnaisance photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau taken during World War II

The production of knowledge, fake news, has no source, no center. There is no author. By VLADIMIR MILADINOVIĆ and STEPHENIE YOUNG

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“The game on TV is Tom and Jerry, the game in the EU is refugees and the police.” By NIKA AUTOR

The current crisis is making many of us increasingly amenable to other forms of more mundane automation. By JOEL McKIM

With a donation you can support our work on the English autobiography.

Bielefeld University enables the further production of preview films from the filmography of Harun Farocki.

The Open Call runs until September 25, 2020.

A panel discussion about Berlin vs. Amazon and the Berliner Gazette's Silent Works project, a partnership with HaFI.

HaFI participation with a panel dedicated to Farocki and his TV collaboration with the WDR.

How can, how should these images be looked at? And how do they unsettle the contemporary gaze?

If we have reason to panic, what do we do with it, where do we go? Again, how do we get out of here? By DANIEL A. BARBER

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More people are having powerful dreams that get their attention than in typical times. By JORDAN BASEMAN

We know that their echoes will continue reverberating in the system’s cracks, each time becoming louder and more visible. By ARTS CATALYST

Bring it on (bring it all up) say the cards, and let everything bleed ... By PLASTIQUE FANTASTIQUE

Remains of magnolias blown away/Branches fall. Power out. By ALEXANDRA DÉLANO ALONSO

There is something visceral about the refusal to place a protective barrier across the mouth and nose, and to do so in the name of “freedom” or “just because.” By KIMBERLY JUANITA BROWN

The kind of hope that I will speak of here is immanent, yet precisely as the immanent force of finitude. By JOHN PAUL RICCO

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The psychology of finite resources can only exist under the conditions of oppression, so let's burn down the master’s house and its tools. By JANINE FRANCOIS

It is remarkable how much we can discover in our immediate spaces when our attention has not been captured by the constant haste of our responsibilities. By EDINSON ARROYO

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I see ghost bodies that are trapped into an unattainable time-space of which the image’s virtuality reinforces the feeling. By VANESSA CIMORELLI

Burdened with a doubtful reputation, the practice and attitude of escapism may eventually prove to hold an adequate response to the dire realities of the present and the time to come.

For the art school to survive, let alone thrive, we will have to adjust not only our tactics for working and teaching, but also for industrial action. By JULIET JACQUES

We read Arendt’s words as an undeniable exhortation to what may be may transpire when the economic and social crisis exacerbated by Covid-19 soon manifests in full. By LUIS FEDUCHI

The whole operation appears intrinsically flawed, reflecting a collective colour-blind attitude that has become particularly visible in light of recent events. By ALESSANDRA FERRINI

The transient nature of knowledge production today, whether in the solution-averse casualised university or the history-averse design program, is a matter of its exacerbating devaluation. By BAHAR NOORIZADEH

The more piercingly the crisis sirens howl, the greater the hunger for dedicated emergency workers, determined people of action and indomitable freedom fighters. By ULRICH BRÖCKLING

The world sleeps, the axes change. The world wakes up, and the sun falls on empty streets. By ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS

How can we create work from within these imposed conditions and reflect on them at the same time? By PIL AND GALIA KOLLECTIV

If we can collectively grasp this narrative, kick them out as soon as possible we can have it all!!!! By HANA NOORALI and LYNTON TALBOT

I couldn’t help but question, if bringing our bodies together in this way plays into the logic of resilience measures the British government has come to calculate as necessary collateral damage for the UK economy to start again? By HELENE KAZAN

In its new blanket use, it points to medical conditions, chronic illnesses and disabilities that, in combination with age, we are told, are the real factors determining the death of thousands of people from the virus. By ELISA ADAMI

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Social proximity at an ideological level may, thanks to those who must necessarily remain physically proximate in medical and care situations, protect people by enabling physical distance. By DEAN KENNING

We thank all our supporters!

Experimental filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane (U.S.A.) is the fourth guest of the Harun Farocki Residency.

A dossier consisting of documents and images on the "prison images" complex from the HaFI archive, compiled by HaFI.

The issue #109 Navigation Beyond Vision II of the e-flux journal is now online.

Hidden curricula, nudging regimes, governmentalities—they are coming to the fore now, accruing obscene visibility in a big stand-off between liberal individualism and uniformizing state rule.

Alongside these ‘necro-visualisations’ of human tragedy, the concept of the model cuts across the public imagination as a harbinger of what might be and what was. By TOM CORBY

Comparing the corona-phenomena to previous epidemic occurrences allows us to gain a grain of understanding and to make sense of the void, of absent bodies. By ANTOINE SIMEAO SCHALK

The ‘great withdrawal’ has made the circulations that make up subject-object relations almost brutally concrete. By LINA HAKIM

The mines are exploited and emptied. There is a lacuna—left as a poisonous gift of modernity. Debris next to a village. Next to my village. By VINIT AGARWAL

Those resistant to the idea of sortition as a substitute for election are often surprised when it is made clear to them that the use of random selection is a standard and reliable practice in many representative democracies. By LUIS FEDUCHI

Window Poster # 1 + Colouring-in Version, May 2020. Poster designed by JAMES SMITH

Calling the hospitals by the person epitomising modern nursing was not a simple misnomer but a poor attempt at dressing up a wolf bred by austerity in the clothes of a sheep versed in historical knowledge. By JELENA STOJKOVIC

Our own cells split the foreign intruder, allowing it to contaminate our body, turning ourselves into our own evil twins. By LANA LIN and H. LAN THAO LAM

It turns out that Seligman had chronicled the psychic wounds of colonialism, revealing a political order fundamentally at odds with Britain’s self-understanding. By MARGARETA KERN

They have recorded the song in Zulu, each vocalist recording in their own home and supplying these voice-messages to be incorporated into this new rendition of the song. By PHILIP MILLER

"Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs."

The emergency measures are rules of composition. By DAVE BEECH

Really: that brachiosaurus-sized crane puts time into perspective, making more tangible the way the world may have looked when it teemed with life at that scale. By SARA BLAYLOCK

Appropriating the simplicity of play, it seems, might come with consequences. By ERAY ÇAYLI

How tired the world has become of this human and its spectre. By YVE LOMAX

The confusion and turbulence of COVID: that is the place we all share now. It’s the first movement of the sonata, grave. By PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN

As a society, in a way unlike any other, the question is out in the open: what does it mean to consider the lives of others? By ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN

Perhaps we do not need a critique of the power-relation in “giving a voice” but of the very demand for a body to produce a recognizable voice in the first place. By ALEXANDRA PIRICI

The non-human futures of the SARS-CoV-2 virus will not be written to be stored in the digital archive. Its trans-species assemblage will have had vectors that are imperceptible to us today. By AMIT S. RAI

I see my dry hands, clean as hell, as never before. And I see fear in a handful of sanitizer. A dispatch from Warsaw. By KASIA BOJARSKA

We would be very interested in getting this stock from you. Please let us know if it is still available.

We, survivors, were born for this crisis. By OREET ASHERY

April 2020 saw gatherings of the American right-wing that declared they demand to “re-open the economy,” as they call it. These protests were payed for by the wealthiest donors to the US Republican party. By JOSHUA SIMON

We may ask, whether in the current, transitional period of social distancing, where intermingling, contact and proximity have become anathema, the notion of entanglement is already accruing a new set of connotations, regardless whether we understand it in a concrete or metaphorical sense. By ERIC C. H. DE BRUYN

"[...] a tsunami of derivative, cliche ads all within a week of one another. It's not a conspiracy - but perhaps a sign that it's time for something new" (Microsoft Sam)

I lift one side of the headphones away from my left ear dispelling the patch of workplace that has been mapped onto the kitchen table for the last hour or so. By JON THOMSON and ALISON CRAIGHEAD

Biocontainment suits, biological hoods, and isolation tents create physical separation, but allow for visual access, between the infected and the hygienic. By SHANNON MATTERN

"In chaos causality is lost, strategy and leadership no longer work as well, and we are left powerless."

A small selection of texts written by the outstanding film critic and translator Frieda Grafe, complemented by a speech from Harun Farocki.

Is the sender genuinely asking me if I am well or safe or healthy? By DANAH ABDULLA

By a pupil at The Meadows Primary School, Lincoln, with RUTH EWAN

The choices of headlines and visual artwork reflect the editorial and national context of each magazine.

He was let down by both governments… By JORDAN McKENZIE

"She is wearing a lab coat and a face mask and is saying, in the softest tone possible, that she is about to take a nasal swab to test for the virus. It’s scary and soothing at the same time."

(...) how and where am i supposed to read the nuances by which I understand the world (...) By TERESA CISNEROS

The background and experience from which the new instructional visuals on the coronavirus crisis are being produced, inform the reduction guided by notions of didactic efficiency.

Media corporations will likely leverage the CoVid-19 crisis to insist that ubiquitous high-bandwidth media constitute an essential service. By LAURA U. MARKS

In the corona triage the temporality of field surgery and the asymmetrical chronopolitics of age cohort, class affiliation and racial predicament meet in a new constellation.

Interaction designer Christian Lässer is able to render evident (and visible) how the topic of the epidemic has gradually taken possession of Die Zeit – up to the full blown monopolization of its editorial content.

It seems to me as if theoretical persuasions are now being confirmed not only in practice, but literally embodied. By JAN DISTELMEYER

Shouldn’t this crisis demand an urgent politics of the domestic, specifically of those who have the privilege to #stayathome?

There is "a good chance that the large-scale experimentation with telepresence, which has long met with much resistance, will encourage its lasting adoption" (André Gunthert).

The Coronacrisis cover artwork of the French daily newspaper Libération, starting with the issue of January 23, continuing without interruption from March 9 to ...

The V-shape recession, a sudden deep trough, followed by a quick surge, for few, and the Germans with their economic strength and infamous intransigence when it comes to economic solidarity most certainly among them, is becoming analogous to the V-ictory-sign (in the wake of the V-irus ...)

It seems as if Suely Rolnik has already in 2005 anticipated the effects of the virus that is currently chokeholding the world: For the already discriminated minorities, including the predominantly black service providers and domestic workers recruited from the favelas, are now considered particularly at risk. By SABETH BUCHMANN

Photos by LUDGER BLANKE        

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The retreat into "solitary facelessness," however, may have different faces, depending on local histories and urgencies.

If anything could stand-in as a primary culprit in the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus that is circling the globe with seemingly unprecedented speed, it might be the jet plane. By VANESSA SCHWARTZ

Today: Le Petit Journal (February 1911), covering the devastating 1910/1911"pest" in Manchuria

Albeit everyone seems to believe otherwise, every crisis has a history. Hence this crisis has a history as well. BY MARK TERKESSIDIS

Today: a reportage on the cholera in Hamburg in 1892 from the Illustrated London News.

In our compromised and entangled ways, we try to keep going, trying to transmutate heteronomy into shades of autonomy. By SVEN LÜTTICKEN

First delivery: an illustrated reportage on the cholera in Naples in 1884 from the Illustrated London News.

Beneath the current debates and statements about the "costs" of lockdowns and social distancing, beneath Trumpian disengagement from medical cure (in his attempt to decouple the health catastrophe of the pandemic from the "problem" of ecomomic repression and de-growth), there lurks the most vicious vision/version of "therapeutic nihilism."

This weekend's news about 65 Cuban doctors, nurses and technicians arriving in Milan to support the Italian health system's struggle against the coronavirus are a forceful reminder of Fidel Castro's medical internationalism.

Perhaps live streaming should be reduced to the bare minimum: to tutorials around health and medical issues, to tele-meetings of the infected and vulnerable with their loved ones, to non-commercial online courses in the newly decentralized educational systems.

What if the irreversible situation in which the "world community" is now being united, forced to reimagine itself, has entailed a sudden leap in visibility regarding the global accumulation of crises - not primarily as a result of tireless research, political organizing, artistic productions etc., but rather as a correction of the collective sensorium on a gigantic scale?

Among the most unsettling attributes that have quickly gained notoriety (and poignancy) due to the the current crisis' new linguistic conventions  and discursive framings can be counted "from a distance" or "remote".

In the current situation (and any comparable state of emergency caused by an epidemic) much of the existing hope hinges on the statistical and epidemiological sciences that model an event like this by means of computational processing.

A photograph of nurse Elena Pagliarini, fallen asleep, that was taken last week at the end of one of her shift at 6 a.m. in the emergency room of the hospital of Cremona, a particularly badly affected town in Lombardy.

By now, as to be expected from a news situation as engrossing as this one, the compulsion to reach an (or even the image) of the pandemic (if not the world history of pandemics), is tantamount...

Marxist biologist Rob Wallace, founder of Structural One Health [...] renders – vividly and frighentingly – the broader context of the coronavirus crisis...

Pëtr Kropotkin's anarchist-anti-capitalist-commonist-animalist notion of "mutual aid" has been gaining traction for a while already...

An insightful contribution by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on the socio-ethical dimensions of the crisis...

Among the countless troubling aspects of the Covid-19 crisis is the liberating effect it has on AI-based surveillance technologies and policies...

Angela Mitropoulos' article "Against Quarantine" is an important intervention in the debate around the COVID-19 crisis...

As the Coronavirus crisis is evolving, it becomes harder to tell what kind of image the most publicised image of/on the crisis is exactly...

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The screening is part of the #Forum 50 series of the Berlinale.

A list of previous digitisations from the holdings of the HaFI

Screening of the three-part WDR program on the “Other Cinema” (1969) - with Harun Farocki among others.

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The first presentation of the unfinished film HARD SELLING by Harun Farocki, which was recently found in the HaFI archive.

You can support the printing of Farocki’s writings with a donation now.

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The Public Screening is now being continued with a curated program by Stefan Pethke.

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The booklet is dedicated to the WDR editor Werner Dütsch (1939-2018), who produced numerous films from Harun Farocki.

New publication: Volume 4 of Farocki's Writings.

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Premiere of the film and material unearthed in the archive of the Harun Farocki Institute will be shown beforehand.

The current issue 101 on “Navigation Beyond Vision” is now online.

The video documentation is now online.

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What can archives do for today’s society? How are historical realities translated into contemporary narratives? Can transformation be archived?

Against Cinema, against Culture

Wild's first longer film is set between the fronts of the 1980s revolution in the Philippines (...).

In 1977 Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring embark on a journey through France. They trace the escape route of the German emigration in France 1940/41 (...).

HaFI is one of the participating institutions in Archive Außer Sich since 2017. A complete overview of our activities is now available on a dedicated website.

The meeting focuses on artistic/creative and political/ethical positions within global radical film cultures and video activism movements.

Texts and documents concerning the production context at "Westdeutscher Rundfunk", Cologne

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Navigation begins where the map ends (...).

The film diverges from traditional ethnographic work and is instead a multi-layered media translation (...).

An experimental essay documentary film on the concept of “Nationality”.

Text excerpts.

irregularly, not haphazardly

Contributions from individuals and communities both inside and outside academia, from artists, activists, filmmakers, researchers, scientists and others are welcome.

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see German post.

The film portrays the four wives of a marabout in Niger, enclosed in the eponymous courtyard of a building complex. They manage to develop micro-economic strategies to form relationships with the exterior world.

In December 2018 we celebrated the three-year existence of HaFI together with the friends, the Farocki family, and our project partners...

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The presentation "Harun Farocki As A Method" revisits films and artworks from Egypt and the context of the Arab world.

A screening with Ali Hussein Al Adawy, the third Harun Farocki residency scholarship holder.

A cooperation event with HaFI.

As history continues, more and more marks are left on the surface of the earth.

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Godard stopped traveling to foreign countries, his camera must not even drive around much by car.

From the beginning of September we will be welcoming Ali Hussein Al Adawy as the third fellowship holder of the Harun Farocki Residency in Berlin.

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The film combines enacted scenes and historical material and is about the past and present of Levantkade in Amsterdam’s old harbor (...)

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A discovery from Farocki’s estate will be shown on this occasion.

A film about the legal process against the ‚Plowshares Eight‘, eight members of the Christian peace movement in US, who hammered a nuclear warhead to pieces at a weapon’s factory.

Jürgen Ebert will present and talk about the last unpublished issue of the magazine, Filmkritik No. 335-336, Nov-Dec 1984, now released on the occasion of "Edit Film Culture!".

With a delay of over 33 years the last unpublished issue of the magazine, Filmkritik No. 335-336, Nov-Dec 1984, will now appear. This edition is dedicated to the filmmaker Emile de Antonio.

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Nightshift explored the work of women in relation to politics, film, desire, and society.

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A reprint of the yearly indexes from 1975 to 1983, supplemented by the the index for 1984 which was still missing.

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The titles of Norman's films all hint at the struggle to assert an Afro-American identity in a world shaped by whites.

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The first edition of Rosa Mercedes online journal. An audio journey with Marianna Maruyama through the Farocki Now Academy in Berlin

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Logik des Gefühls: What happens? Nothing much. […] Where is it set? In an in-between space, between lost love and a coming love. Winter. Berlin. 1981.

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News from the archive: INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PULL OFF POLICE HELMETS and UNTITLED OR: NIXON COMES TO BERLIN, both made in 1969.

HaFi presents the film PROFESSION: DOCUMENTARIST, followed by a discussion between Shirin Barghnavard and Constanze Ruhm

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In the framework of the "Farocki Now" Academy, the UdK (University of the Arts) Berlin organises a LARP. Roles are still available upon registration.

For the second Harun Farocki Residency we have invited the Tehran-based Iranian filmmaker and editor Shirin Barghnavard to Berlin for three months.

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A forum for workshops, presentations, and debates which explore the contemporary relevance of Harun Farocki’s work and thought, placing it in new contexts and activating its productive potential

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Tonight: Opening of the retrospective of Harun Farocki's work for cinema and television at Kino Arsenal.

From “A for Adorno” to “Z for Zidane” – an ABCs of the Essay Film accompanied by a short text Farocki wrote in 1987.

A selection of materials pertaining to the film "Before Yor Eyes - Vietnam" introduced by a commentary penned by the Harun Farocki Institut.

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Political commitment, thirst for research and stamina. A film by Ogawa Productions.

Factories and families as places of exploitation, which don’t just have to be interpreted but also changed.

Documentary filmmaker Gerhard Benedikt Friedl describes Helmut Färber's method of teaching film history.

Helmut Färber’s 80th anniversary was celebrated by some (German language) texts in the media

A mythological road movie, a squatter and hacker story.

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Kevin B. Lee about Farocki's working paper "What Ought to Be Done".

The talk will include the screening of "Ronny und Harun spielen Theater" which is a short documentary of a staged scene from “Etwas wird sichtbar” (“Before Your Eyes Vietnam”), 1982.

See German post.

Formulating a poetic framework to explore the contemporary landscape of media and terror.

A brilliant (and moving) lesson of how to navigate a post-cinema small screen reality.

Harun Farocki saw the film in 1971 at the Hamburger Filmschau. In the succeeding years, he worked closely with Engström.

Kevin B. Lee will give a „light-typing lecture“ introducing his works and practice.

The blog of the HaFI residency publishes the immediate and informal experiences made by the HaFI residency fellows.

See German post.

See German post.

Kevin B. Lee will be the first guest of the Harun Farocki residency from the middle of December onwards

Architecture, Instructional Technology, and the Social Production of Pedagogical Space Around 1970

Letters exchanged between Harun Farocki, Peter Weiss and Westdeutscher Runfunk (WDR): A glimpse at the production history of "On Display: Peter Weiss".

For the Harun Farocki Institut, Peter Weiss’ 100th birthday on November 8, 2016 meant an opportunity to take a closer look at Farocki’s WDR program “On display: Peter Weiss”.

A guided tour followed by a screening and a talk with Carles Guerra and Bert Rebhandl.

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We were isolated individuals and simultaneously subsumed into a totality* 


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‘What is navigation?’ inquires the curatorial seminar 2016/17 of the CCC Research-Based Master Programms / Visual Arts Department of HEAD – Geneva.

Expropriating Television.

The Harun Farocki Institut organizes Farocki Now - A Temporary Academy as a component of the “Harun Farocki Retrospective”.

A working paper by Farocki (1975/76), a commentary by Tom Holert, Doreen Mende and Volker Pantenburg followed by a letter by Peter Nestler.

The Institut's first public appearance at Berlinale 2016. A graffiti by Harun Farocki.

Material to investigate the present, the future past. Impressions from the archive of the Farocki Institut.