The exhibition Harun Farocki: quem é responsável? opens on September 17 and is essential to understanding the transformations of everyday working life in the contemporary world.
The exhibition, which anticipates today’s Uberization of work, takes place at Instituto Moreira Salles, curated by Antje Ehmann and Heloisa Espada, who is also the IMS visual arts coordinator.
It brings together seven works by this essential artist, who left us far too soon, presenting the world of work through situations ranging from the sixteenth century to the contemporary scene.
In his films and video installations, Farocki shows different strategies of worker exploitation and alienation and reflects on how the means of production and technologies define personal relationships and social organization.
One highlight of the exhibition is the video installation Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006). Comprising 12 television sets, this work assembles scenes from numerous films produced from the 1890s to the 2000s.
Its starting point is one of cinema’s earliest records: an 1895 film by the Lumière brothers showing workers hurrying out of a photographic-products factory owned by the brothers themselves. Images by Fritz Lang, Charles Chaplin and Lars von Trier also appear, helping us understand representations of workers throughout film history and addressing the political role of images.
The politics of images
The political role of images becomes explicit in one of the works in this exhibition: Workers Leaving Their Workplace (2011–2014). It is very interesting to view this work in contrast to Workers Leaving the Factory.
© Harun Farocki GbR, 2011-2014
Here the images are contemporary and show a variety of spaces. The factory is no longer the metaphor for the world of work. With images of offices and big-city streets, the work reflects the transformations of an economic system—capitalism—that, instead of producing wealth and freedom, has imposed a regime in which we can work all the time, at any hour, anywhere.
Farocki anticipated what we now call the aesthetics of surveillance. In the exhibition preceding this São Paulo show, at IMS in Rio, the focus was on his works about control systems emerging with new technologies and replicated endlessly, from street webcams to video-game settings. In the exhibition opening at IMS Paulista, the discussion leads us toward an understanding of the 24/7 world, of a late capitalism conspiring to end sleep, as Jonathan Crary has shown, and which has led to the everyday reality of The Burnout Society, analyzed by Byung-Chul Han.
Opening Tuesday the 17th. Get ready!
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7 FM).
Access the playlist with all audio recordings of the Ouvir Imagens column on Rádio USP | Read all transcripts and posts.
This column has a playlist on YouTube! Listen and share.