TUESDAY OCTOBER 7, 2008
6:00 – 7:00 pm

The first North American publication devoted to the installation work of the German filmmaker Harun Farocki. Various aspects of Farocki’s work including his artistic process, his use of the museum space, his vision machines and the influence of Dziga Vertov on his work are discussed in a series of essays by Harun Farocki, Rembert Hüser, Michèle Thériault, David Tomas and Volker Pantenburg. In English and French.

Edited by Michèle Thériault
Essays: Harun Farocki, Rembert Hüser, Volker Pantenburg, Michèle Thériault, David Tomas.
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery / Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University, $35

LAUNCH PRICE: $30

7:00 pm
Screening of RESPITE

Harun Farocki’s Respite resurrects film footage shot by Rudolf Breslauer, a temporary inmate of Westerbork, the transit camp for Dutch Jews. Commissioned by the camp’s SS commander, Breslauer documented the loading and unloading of incoming and outgoing trains, processing of incoming prisoners, and the varied work and activities of inmates. The surviving, largely unedited, footage and Farocki’s silent intertitle commentary are ambiguous in spite of the surprising specificity of the filmmaker’s research – from a barely visible stamp on a suitcase the titles identify not only the person in the image, but the specific date on which the footage was shot as well as the person’s date and place of death. That Rudolf Breslauer was a victim, and eventually a fatality, of the concentration camp system yet somehow was able to produce a documentary, however compromised, of daily camp life is remarkable in itself. Farocki’s appreciation of and commentary on Breslauer’s footage reconsiders generally accepted visual understandings and impressions of the concentration camp.

Harun Farocki in collaboration with Antje Ehmann, Christiane Hitzemann, Lars Pienkoß, Matthias Rajmann, Jan Ralske, Meggie Schneider video, b/w, 2007, 40 min. Silent with English intertitles

FREE ADMISSION

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