The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery presents six installations by German filmmaker Harun Farocki, some of which will be premiering in North America. The appearance of Farocki’s filmic montages in the gallery environment, in which documentary visuals are subtly accompanied by a spoken commentary, has allowed for his incisive investigation of the image, its demands and its profound implications for the conditions of existence and of production today, to achieve a new spatial deployment – one with multiple vectors – that provokes in the viewer who is “in motion“, another kind of relationship with the temporality and the conceptual framework at play in his films. In Section (Schnittstelle) his first installation, he describes and reflects upon his manner of working at the editing table where image and text, inseparable elements, cross one another. Section will be accompanied by four other installations namely Eye/Machine III (2003); Counter Music, (2004); Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) and Dubbing (2006). In addition the 16 mm film Inextinguishable Fire (1969), in which he stakes out the territory of his filmic investigations, will be screened in the gallery.

Harun Farocki was born in Neutitschein, in German-annexed Czechoslovakia, in 1944. Since graduating from Berlin’s Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in 1966, he has directed more that 90 films that include feature films, documentaries and television programs. He has also collaborated with numerous filmmakers as scriptwriter, actor and producer. His films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2004, and the Vienna Filmmuseum in 2006. He has participated in important international events such as the 2005 Carnegie International and Documenta XII (2007). He has held many teaching posts and between 1993 and 1999 taught at the University of California Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been Visiting professor at Vienna’s Akademie für Bildende Künste. Harun Farocki is a media theorist and writer and was the editor of the influential German film journal Filmkritik from 1974 to 1984. He lives and works in Berlin.

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s contemporary exhibition program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.