'The Spanish brought the cross and they took the silver' (quote by Harun Farocki)
Join us for a special film series of German artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki’s work, cocurated by artist and curator Antje Ehmann and Cooper Gallery (DJCAD) Director and Principal Curator Sophia Yadong Hao. Tonight we present two films from this series in Glasgow:
The Silver and the Cross (2010, 17 min.) and
Nothing Ventured (2004, 50 min.)
The Silver and the Cross is a video-essay in which Harun Farocki regards a painting by Gaspar Miguel de Berrios (1706-1762), from which he develops a discourse on the processes of European colonization and the power obtained by controlling production methods. This piece is an exhaustive analysis by which the towns, workers and the silver mines of Potosí, Perú, are represented during the period of Spanish colonization. (Text source: Gallery website of àngels Barcelona)
Farocki developed a pioneering style of filmmaking building on the social criticism of Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno. In
Workers Leaving the Factory, for instance, flashes of iconic images are juxtaposed—such as the workers leaving the Lumière factory in the first moving image from 1895, or snippets of films with Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin. These fragments of the cinematic past tell a nonlinear story of cinema, not so much about technological development as our enthrallment to and emotional investment in the cinematic image. From his early anti-Vietnam films made in the political crucible of the 1960s to the
Serious Games series, Farocki self-reflexively turns to images to explore the invisible systems in which our lives are entangled, such as capitalism, the mediascape, and war. Images thus are not so much representations of but also interventions that create worlds in and of themselves.
This special film series is part of the public programme for Cooper Gallery's major exhibition Harun Farocki: Consider Labour, which runs until April 1 in Dundee, and is supported by the Goethe-Institut.
Please also join us on March 29 for a screening and discussion in Glasgow of films created in the last months as part of the
Labour in a Single Workshop video project. The panel disussion will be led by Sophia Yadong Hao in conversation with artist and cocurator Antje Ehmann and artists and workshop leaders Gair Dunlop and Pernille Spence. We would love to see you!
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