Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee is proud to present Harun Farocki: Consider Labour, the first major exhibition in Scotland of significant works by pioneering filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014).
Friday 3 February 2023 – Saturday 1 April 2023
Re-inventing the ‘filmic essay’, Farocki’s thought-provoking oeuvre investigates how capitalism, consumerism, media, technology and war intertwine with all our lives for the past century. Influenced by theatre director Bertolt Brecht, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and film director Jean-Luc Godard, Farocki’s unique style of non-narrative-filmmaking consistently addresses practices of labour and the production of images that are concerned with understanding, reflecting and confronting modern society.
Bringing together the ten-screen film installation Labour in a Single Shot with Farocki’s most celebrated filmic essays; Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), Georg K. Glaser – Writer and Smith (1988), and In Comparison (2009), Harun Farocki: Consider Labour at Cooper Gallery critically questions the technological, aesthetic, and political conditions of making labour visible.
Labour in a Single Shot, the last project undertaken by Farocki in collaboration with Antje Ehmann, unashamedly opens our eyes to labour, whether paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, rich in tradition or altogether new. Developed in fifteen cities on five continents through workshops with artists, amateurs, and students, Farocki, Ehmann and their collaborators portrayed the toil of cobblers, cooks, domestic workers, garbage workers, nurses, tattoo artists, waiters, and window cleaners with a nuanced and ethically conscious eye. Comprised of a single shot and always between one or two minutes in length, each video evokes, in classic Brechtian fashion, crucial questions on the politics and representation of labour under global capitalism
Examining brick making as an analogy to society, In Comparison echoes the words of the Soviet documentary film maker Dziga Vertov who wrote ‘film truth is made of material as a house is made of bricks’ to critically consider how bricks and film making both create spaces, organise social relations and hold knowledge about society.
Workers Leaving the Factory explores a 45 second sequence from the first cinema film ever shown in public that depicts workers hurrying through factory gates. Exploring this archetypal moving image made by Louis Lumière in 1895, Farocki takes us through Chaplin’s Modern Times to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis haunted by the possibility of social tension and the ultimate loss of this stereotypical image of industrial labour.
With Georg K. Glaser – Writer and Smith, Farocki presents a close portrait of an artisan metalworker who in the morning writes at his desk then from middy makes bowls, lamps, vases, jugs and other metal work at his workshop in Paris. Through the combination of craftsmanship with writing, Farocki points to the French word artisan in which the syllable ‘art’ is not yet divorced from work.
Underpinned by the political activism of working class culture in Dundee, evident in the Marxist Reading Group on the 1993 Timex Strike picket line and the recent Better than Zero campaign against poverty pay, the exhibition at Cooper Gallery gives this most radical of cities an emotive relationship with all others who labour.
