A word on “post-truth” by postcolonial and photography scholar Zahid R. Chauhary (from his 2020 essay “The Politics of Exposure: Truth after Post-Facts”): “So perhaps it is not simply that truth acts (such as whistleblowing) expose what we already know, but that the place of knowledge in an atmosphere of fetishistic disavowal lends such disavowal a libidinal frisson. In cynical reasoning, truth actually matters a great deal because acting in spite of it is what endows the action with its distinctive fetishistic pleasure.”
October 26th, 2021
In its last issue 155, Camera Austria published a review by Sabine Weier of the HaFI booklet Harun Farocki: Hard Selling. Reframed by Elske Rosenfeld.
October 26th, 2021Lauren Berlant, the brilliant theorist of “cruel optimism” and related issues, died of a rare form of cancer on June 28. The following, devastatingly optimistic quote is from a 2016 essay on the commons as “infrastructures for troubling times,” part of a book that they worked on with the typically double-edged title On the Inconvenience of Other People: “What remains for our pedagogy of unlearning is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire as the work of an aspirational ambivalence. What remains is the potential we have to common infrastructures that absorb the blows of our aggressive need for the world to accommodate us and our resistance to adaptation and that, at the same time, hold out the prospect of a world worth attaching to that’s something other than an old hope’s bitter echo. A failed episode is not evidence that the project was in error. By definition, the common forms of life are always going through a phase, as infrastructures will.”
Some basics from the Strike MoMA site: “Campaigns, actions, and letters chip away at the regime’s facade from the outside. Inside, every time workers organize, defy the boss, care for a coworker, disrespect secrecy, or enact other forms of subversion, cracks are created in the core. Cracking and chipping, chipping and cracking. As the walls that artificially separate the museum from the world collapse, we reorient away from the institution and come together to make plans. Let us strike in all the ways possible to exit from the terms of the museum so we can set our own.”
via Hyperallergic on the environmental impact of blockchain referring to recent NFT (non-fungible token) art sales: “This is not the first time the art world has come under scrutiny for being on the wrong side of the climate conversation. Artists and activists have protested everything from the carbon footprint of physical art fairs to the fossil fuel money funding major museums. But some say the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies is particularly egregious, and research shows it’s relatively easily quantifiable. A study by Cambridge University, for instance, estimates that bitcoin uses more electricity per year than the entire nation of Argentina. (Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but one transaction uses more power than an average US household in a day, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.)”
Nicholas Mirzoeff on “Artificial vision, white space and racial surveillance capitalism”: “Based as it is on ‘epidermalization’ (the assertion of absolute difference based on relative differences in skin color), AI’s racial surveillance deploys an all-too-familiar racialized way of seeing operating at plan-etary scale. It is the plantation future we are now living in. All such operations take place in and via the new imagined white space of technology known as the cloud. In reality, a very material arrangement of servers and cables, the cloud is both an engine of high-return low-employment capitalism and one of the prime drivers of carbon emissions.”
Sara Ahmed on the performativity of disgust (from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004): “To name something as disgusting is to transfer the stickiness of the word ‘disgust’ to an object, which henceforth becomes generated as the very thing that is spoken. The relationship between the stickiness of the sign and the stickiness of the object is crucial to the performativity of disgust as well as the apparent resistance of disgust reactions to ‘newness’ in terms of the generation of different kinds of objects. The object that is generated as a disgusting (bad) object through the speech act comes to stick. It becomes sticky and acquires a fetish quality, which then engenders its own effects.”
November 7th, 2020Projects
The HaFI initiates its own projects as an institute together with its network as well as in cooperation with institutional and individual partners. Their starting point can be themes or concepts from Harun Farocki, but also issues relating to documentary practices, changes in seeing and visibility, the work of images, and the work with images in general. Embedded in medium and long-term research processes, the projects are articulated in events and screenings, in publications, exhibitions, and educational offers.
All the Missing Limbs of a Pre/oposition is a series of non-thematic events on Zoom that discursify the inextricability of ‘prepositions’ and propositions...
Coincidences in Prepositions is a publication program conceptualized to review questions, propositions, and solutions that have been set up in the dis/continuities of many colonial milieus...
Conceived as a year-long project, our partner Berliner Gazette will initiate diverse activities, most importantly a series of texts and a conference.
The first HaFI book in collaboration with the Viennese publishing house Synema.
An online event organized by Journal of Visual Culture and HaFI.
"Kein Schöner Archiv" documents the intangible cultural heritage of the postmigrant society.
Our cooperation partners organize for the second time the Radical Film Network Meeting Berlin. With a contribution from Elske Rosenfeld based on the HaFI 014 pamphlet.
Das Arsenal organizes the first edition of the "Archival Assembly" festival, which brings together film archives and film archival projects, including HaFI, for an exchange with the public.
Volume 5, now released, brings together all of the texts published in the years 1986-2000 and offers insights into some of Farocki's seminal cinematic and installation works from this period.
In HaFI 014, artist Elske Rosenfeld reflects on the reading of the fragmentary archival materials for Farocki's unfinished film "Hard Selling" (1991) with her own text/image essay.
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.
Organized by the Berliner Gazette at Haus der Statistik from November 7 - 28, 2020. A cooperation with HaFI.
HaFI publications in Korean and Turkish
November 16th, 2020 — Projects / Publication
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.’
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?
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.
A small selection of texts written by the outstanding film critic and translator Frieda Grafe, complemented by a speech from Harun Farocki.
The screening is part of the #Forum 50 series of the Berlinale.
Screening of the three-part WDR program on the “Other Cinema” (1969) - with Harun Farocki among others.
The first presentation of the unfinished film HARD SELLING by Harun Farocki, which was recently found in the HaFI archive.
The Public Screening is now being continued with a curated program by Stefan Pethke.
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.
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.
May 27th, 2019 — Projects / EventWhat can archives do for today’s society? How are historical realities translated into contemporary narratives? Can transformation be archived?
May 7th, 2019 — Projects / Event
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.
April 24th, 2019 — Projects / Event
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
Navigation begins where the map ends (...).
The film diverges from traditional ethnographic work and is instead a multi-layered media translation (...).
Radical Film Network Meeting, May 2-5, 2019, silent green, Berlin: OPEN CALL “What is Radical Film?”
Contributions from individuals and communities both inside and outside academia, from artists, activists, filmmakers, researchers, scientists and others are welcome.
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.
The presentation "Harun Farocki As A Method" revisits films and artworks from Egypt and the context of the Arab world.
October 25th, 2018 — Residency / 2018
A screening with Ali Hussein Al Adawy, the third Harun Farocki residency scholarship holder.
A cooperation event with HaFI.
October 23rd, 2018 — Projects / Event
see German post
Godard stopped traveling to foreign countries, his camera must not even drive around much by car.
The film combines enacted scenes and historical material and is about the past and present of Levantkade in Amsterdam’s old harbor (...)
See German post.
A discovery from Farocki’s estate will be shown on this occasion.
July 2nd, 2018 — Projects / Event
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!".
June 30th, 2018 — Projects / Event
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.
Nightshift explored the work of women in relation to politics, film, desire, and society.
A reprint of the yearly indexes from 1975 to 1983, supplemented by the the index for 1984 which was still missing.
The titles of Norman's films all hint at the struggle to assert an Afro-American identity in a world shaped by whites.
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.
See German post.
In the framework of the "Farocki Now" Academy, the UdK (University of the Arts) Berlin organises a LARP. Roles are still available upon registration.
October 17th, 2017 — Projects / Event
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
See German post.
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.
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
April 26th, 2017 — Projects / Research
A mythological road movie, a squatter and hacker story.
See German post.
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.
February 16th, 2017 — Projects / Event
Harun Farocki saw the film in 1971 at the Hamburger Filmschau. In the succeeding years, he worked closely with Engström.
See German post.
November 30th, 2016 — Projects / ResearchArchitecture, Instructional Technology, and the Social Production of Pedagogical Space Around 1970
November 30th, 2016 — Projects / Research
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”.
November 8th, 2016 — Projects / ResearchA guided tour followed by a screening and a talk with Carles Guerra and Bert Rebhandl.
November 1st, 2016 — Projects / EventSee German post.
October 25th, 2016 — Projects / ResearchWe were isolated individuals and simultaneously subsumed into a totality*
October 12th, 2016 — Projects / EventSee German post.
September 15th, 2016 — Projects / Research‘What is navigation?’ inquires the curatorial seminar 2016/17 of the CCC Research-Based Master Programms / Visual Arts Department of HEAD – Geneva.
September 5th, 2016 — Projects / ResearchExpropriating Television.
September 1st, 2016 — Projects / ResearchThe Harun Farocki Institut organizes Farocki Now - A Temporary Academy as a component of the “Harun Farocki Retrospective”.
August 30th, 2016 — Projects / Event
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.