The Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) is a charitable foundation trust established in 2015. Its official bodies, in accordance with the Articles of Association, are the Board of Directors, the Harun Farocki Institut Board, and the Friends of the HaFI, which is currently being established. The Board of Directors is composed of Tom Holert, Doreen Mende, Clio Nicastro, and Volker Pantenburg. The members of the Harun Farocki Institut Board are currently Antje Ehmann, Anselm Franke, Holger Glinka, Christian Petzold, Doina Popescu, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, and Bertold Schmidt-Thomé. Day-to-day operational business is managed by Elsa de Seynes.

The idea for the founding of an institute in and with Harun Farocki’s name arose shortly after his sudden death in the summer of 2014. That the gap that he left could not be filled was clear to all the participants. However, his painful absence was connected with a responsibility, the fulfillment of which is as consolatory as it is productive. The institute is to serve as a medium, point of contact, and organizational form for the large, international network of family, friends, colleagues, and cooperation partners.

The founding of the HaFI is linked to the goal of developing forms of theoretical and visual work which build on the ideas of Harun Farocki’s cinematic praxis. The principles and procedures of the essay film, the Marxist analysis of images, the activation of images for genuine visual research, the observation of work, the development of a filmic literacy, the analysis of subjectification in technical-military dispositives, or the critique of the relations of production in film, television, and other visual industries form the basis upon which the HaFI conceives and carries out its own projects.

The HaFI is dependent on voluntary engagement. A small office in the silent green Kulturquartier forms the base station. At the moment the HaFI can only afford a half-time manager position, and must scale its projects accordingly. We make every effort to respond to queries and to do justice to the interest in Harun Farocki and our work, however we ask for your understanding if we do not answer immediately.

Bit by bit the HaFI is accessing Harun Farocki’s estate, part of which is already housed in the immediate vicinity of the institute in a separate section of the new archive rooms of the Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst in silent green Kulturquartier. This is being carried out together with the compiling of a complete catalogue raisonné, which in addition to the film, television and video works will also include Farocki’s text and radio pieces.

The institute’s research projects are, on the one side, immediately linked to the archival work on his estate, and on the other, build upon certain questions and methodologies which we connect with Farocki’s praxis. Such research can be expressed in exhibitions, text and image production on the website, smaller printed matter, public discussions, screenings, and other forms of pedagogic work.

Furthermore, every year the HaFI, in cooperation with the Goethe Institut, nominates a candidate for a Farocki residency.

Films, videos, and installations from Harun Farocki can still be requested directly from the Harun Farocki GbR. However, in individual cases, those tasks which exceed the capacity of the small film production company founded by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann, which following his death has been continued in the form of the Harun Farocki GbR by Antje Ehmann, Anna Faroqhi, and Lara Faroqhi, can be assumed by the Harun Farocki Institut.