Between Eye and Hand

The first exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion showcased work by the acclaimed video artist and film essayist Harun Farocki. The exhibition centred on the four-part series Serious Games (2009/10). For these new video installations, Farocki made recordings in US military bases and combined his own sequences with excerpts from computer simulations. These game-like programs are used by soldiers as training exercises for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and potential crisis areas. A further variant is shown in Immersion (part of the Serious Games series), which deals with the re-staging of soldiers’ combat traumas using this kind of simulation technology, here for therapeutic purposes.

The relation between technology and war already played a decisive role in Farocki‘s earlier works. In Eye/Machine III (2003), the artist relates it to conditions of economic production. He compares surveillance mechanisms during armed conflict with the use of cameras in civilian life, as for registering movements in public places or monitoring processes in highly mechanised industrial plants. He sees the human eye as increasingly replaced by the computer in war and industry alike, the natural function of the eye being taken over by machines in both situations.

In his double-channel-installation Comparison via a Third (2007) the concrete depiction of the techniques by means of which bricks are manufactured, makes you see a global system of inequalities and continuities, defining the modern world. After many years of working with video Farocki had again the opportunity to film with 16mm on construction sites in India, Africa and Europe.

The exhibition presented also Farocki’s first film made without a camera. In-Formation (2005) assembles scanned pictograms from schoolbooks, magazines and newspapers. Farocki took examples of diagrams and used them to reconstruct the history of migration in the Federal Republic of Germany. What Farocki is seeking therefore, is a conceptual critique of the ways in which migration is presented, pursuing the icons and symbols back to their origins and examining them with regard to contents they themselves are unaware of.

EXHIBITION GUIDES