Fashion
This Filmmaker Saw War Everywhere, and So Can You
Harun Farocki, a German artist and documentarian, spent his career unpacking how consumer and military technology intermingle in even the most mundane images.
For Harun Farocki, even as visual media raced from film strips to computers, one thing remained constant: Pictures reveal more than they intend to.
Naming the ideologies embedded in workaday images was Farocki’s life’s work. The German filmmaker and artist was born in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1944 to an Indian father and German mother, lived in a divided Germany, and died in 2014, in a booming, unified Berlin. He spent six decades scrutinizing visual culture with a leftist eye, making more than 100 films and videos.
His meticulous style of essay film, combining found images and formidably researched texts, has become essential to the cinematic tool kit.
Eight of his works on the perennial theme of war, curated by Antje Ehmann, an artist and Farocki’s widow, are on view at Greene Naftali. (So are 12 of his T-shirts, bearing political slogans, some soft and stained from wear.)
Farocki’s previous three shows at the gallery mostly featured new work, but this show presents projects made between 1967 and 2010, pointedly screening Vietnam War-era films (albeit digitized) alongside Iraq War-era videos.
