Labour in a Single Shot: An Artist Talk

The Bangkok International Film Festival, the Goethe-Institut Thailand, and Harun Farocki GbR are proud to host Farocki’s partner and collaborator, Antje Ehmann, for an artist talk on their project Labour in a Single Shot, which they carried out between 2011 and 2014.

The first camera in the history of cinema was aimed at a factory. In a single take of around 45 seconds, the film by the Lumière brothers shows men and women leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon. Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit (Labour in a Single Shot) grew out of Farocki’s response to this first film.

Together with filmmakers and artists in fifteen cities across five continents (and in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut), Farocki and Ehmann undertook a three-year exploration (2011–2014) of the notion of work in today's world. Inspired by the form of the Lumière film, they set themselves strict limitations: the films to be created were to be no longer than two minutes, they had to be about work, and they could not contain a single cut. This constraint facilitated a precise examination of the working process, its choreography, and the uniqueness of each activity.

After Harun Farocki's passing in 2014, Antje Ehmann continued the project with different filmmaker colleagues in nine additional cities. The globally oriented archive, which now consists of over 600 videos, assumes an almost encyclopaedic character by documenting the realities of work under global capitalism.

The Artist Talk by Antje Ehmann is presented in dialogue with a selection of 29 films by Harun Farocki at the Bangkok International Film Festival, as well as with the installation Parallel I–IV (2012–2014), exhibited at the Goethe-Institut Thailand.