HF I RG [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham]

H F | R G is a unique exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, that brings the vision of two major contemporary artists, Harun Farocki and Rodney Graham, face to face. These two artists share several features in their respective work, such as their use of film and video, in which they impart a quality of reflexive investigation into the medium and into history and self-representation. According to the curator of the exhibition, Chantal Pontbriand, "they brilliantly reveal the tropes of our age." These two artists explore our complex, image-saturated world, which is beset by many existential, social and political difficulties, incisively and with originality. Farocki and Graham are constantly inventing new devices to sharpen our perception of the world.

The exhibition comprises 45 works, including film and video installations by Farocki; 35 and 16 film and video installations, as well as light-boxes, large photographs, conceptual works, and other tri-dimensional installations or objects by Graham. The exhibition articulates four concepts that crisscross the work of both Farocki and Graham. These are the Archive, the Non-verbal, the Machine and Montage, leitmotifs that unfold in various directions depending on the use that is made of them in the different works presented. The artists' use of archives as a source and resource, as text and language, and of compositions which propose the concepts "montage" or "machine", can only make more explicit the "non-verbal" functioning of the image, its open and polysemous nature. The hyperlink, a mode of thinking so typical of today's network culture (beyond post-structuralism and postmodernism) can freely emerge from the exhibition, which is to be permeated with the viewer's individual dynamic.

The exhibition is equivalent to individual retrospectives of both artists, intertwined. Rodney Graham's works from 1984 to the present are included, as well as most of Harun Farocki's installations from 1995 to the present. A major retrospective of his films from 1966 to now, shown in the Jeu de Paume Cinema, completes the exhibition project.

Rodney Graham was born in 1949 in the region of Vancouver in Canada, where he currently lives and works. He has exhibited his work since the 1980s in both North America and Europe. In 1992, he took part in Documenta IX in Kassel and represented Canada at the Venice Biennial in 1997. Rodney Graham's work (films, videos, photography, scale models, books and musical partitions) plays with the forms and devices of the perception of art, analyzing the formal and narrative structures of different media in order to manipulate their usual signification to best effect. Recently, addressing himself to the conventions of hollywoodian cinema, as well as rock music, modern or postmodern art, Graham has aligned provocative and innovative statements about artmaking as well as contemporary society.

Born in Germany in 1944, Harun Farocki studied at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakadamie in Berlin, where he currently lives and works. Between 1974 and 1984, he was editor of Filmkritic, a journal in which he pursued his interest in the theory of the image. Aside from his writings, his oeuvre comprises more than 100 films, using a wide variety of media (photography, drawings, documentary images and films) to analyze the convergences between war, economy, and politics within the social space. Since the 1990s, he has produced video installations that address the production and treatment of images in the media and in the institutions that circulate them. He participated in Documenta X and XII, for which Deep Play was commissioned.

Jeu de Paume & Black Jack editions have published a catalogue: HF I RG [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham], April 2009, 208 p.

HF I RG
Harun Farocki / Rodney Graham
Kurator: Chantal Pontbriand