Harun Farocki, Against What? Against Whom?, Raven Row, London

Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom?
Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane, London, E1
19.11.09 - 07.02.10
Wednesday to Sunday 11am - 6pm

Set in the beautiful rooms of 56 Artillery Row in East London, Raven Row is one of London’s newest exhibtion spaces. In this, their 3rd exhibition, curator Alex Sainsbury, has put together an exhibition of multi-screen video works by the highly respected German filmmaker, Harun Farocki.

Eliminating the traditional linearity of the documentary format by taking it out of the cinema screening context, and spreading the works over multiple screens in an environment where we can enter and leave at any point allows Farocki to make use of the juxtaposition and repetition we find in his older work to create dexterously edited montages. Rather than constructing a narrative with a dogmatic message, arguments are proposed and form through the associations allowed to occur by the engineering of a situation in which images are able to align, clash, conflict and inform one-another.

Through a mixture of found, filmed and appropriated imagery the artist’s themes of the eye, the nature of seeing, the functions of imagery, warfare, surveillance, power, the history of cinema and the virtual are able to weave, cross over, merge, slip away and resurface across the exhibition. The exhibition is excellently structured, Farocki’s use of the video installation medium is masterful.