MoMA Acquires 36 Harun Farocki Films, Hosts First US Retrospective

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has acquired 36 films by Harun Farocki and organized his first US retrospective, running until January 2, 2012. The exhibition highlights Farocki's critical examination of military image use, featuring works that appropriate heterogeneous filmic materials from fiction cinema to industrial, military, and police laboratory footage. The opening coincided with the inauguration of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center site. Farocki's activist documentaries engage with current events, drawing from New Wave and Direct Cinema traditions. The retrospective includes works such as 'Interface,' 'Expression of Hands,' 'Comparison,' and 'Serious Games 3.' Farocki's cinema explores the dialectic between eye and hand, a concept he traces through film history from Samuel Fuller to Luis Buñuel. The exhibition also addresses the haptic dimension of images, as theorized by Georges Didi-Huberman. Farocki's work contrasts industrialized and manual labor, and critiques the distance in modern warfare, where missiles replace soldiers' trigger fingers. The retrospective is presented at MoMA Midtown and MoMA PS1, where 'Transmission' shows the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Farocki is represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris/Salzburg), Galerie Barbara Weiss (Berlin), Greene Naftali Gallery (New York), and Àngels Barcelona.