MMCA Seoul, Harun Farocki solo exhibition, What Ought to be done ? Work and Life

Harun Farocki was a german filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film, born in 1944 and dead in 2014. He mostly realized experimental documentaries.

The MMCA, Seoul made this third exhibition about famous contemporain international filmmaker, after Philippe Garrel and Jonas Mekas.

The exhibition is divided in three parts in three halls.

The first one present the most recent work of the artist, Parallel, four video works about the relationship between reality and games. The videos were presented on four different monitors. Each of them were facing two sofas and display like a cross.

The videos showed the evolution of the 3D conception in computer through games. The tittle can be related to the fact that video games could be considered as a parallel world. They offer a new kind of reality. And Harun Farocki is questioning this new reality. In the second and the third Parallel, he focused on the materiality of the game, playing with borders. He is trying to find the structure of the imaginary world. So he is using some special modes in the game and he tries to escape from it and to find a new point of view that could show the point where we can see that this kind of reality is only a construction, a trickery. The voice over in the Parallel III says « the world ends like a board game ». He is also questioning the materiality of the objets in the game. His camera tries to penetrate the ground or some objects. Finally the last Parallel shows the reality of heroes in those kind of game and Farocki used those heroes to think about the notions of provocation and resistance from violent people.

The second part of the exhibition gather the videos from his work Labour in a single shot. The scenography of this hall reminded me the exhibition at the MMCA Gwacheon. The videos were projected on hanging black boards. The audience was able to watch different videos in the same time. It also offered the possibility to walk around the videos. I think that this work could be a collection, or an archive of labour around the world. Harun Farocki realized an anthropology of work through this artwork.

Finally, the last hall gather three different works. Workers leaving the factory in eleven decades is a remake of the first French film make by Louis Brothers, in Lyon. The second one was Comparaison via Third, which showed people producing bricks in both traditional and modern way, in different countries. This work was related to the Labour in a single shot.

His most interesting work in this hall, for me, was Interface. This artwork is composed of two monitors that show two different videos in the same time. The Voice over of those videos is the same. And the movies are also similar. The artist wanted to work about editing and the difference between editing film and editing video. In video, you can see two images in the same time. What was interesting was that as he created a new approach of the film. I didn’t know which monitor to watch as the voice over was the same in both. It shows that those two movies are the same in a way. It says that editing can make your movie pluraliste. This work was also a mise en abîme because he recorded himself watching a video of himself and editing his own movie.