Harun Farocki
Parallele I–IV
24 JAN until 7 MAR 2026
Opening – 23 JAN 2026, 6-9 pm
Trautwein Herleth is pleased to present an exhibition of the four-video suite, Paralleleby Harun Farocki, the final work completed by the pioneering artist before his death in 2014. Farocki finished the first installment of Parallele in 2012. The double channel video charts the development of computer generated imagery from its inception to the present, while simultaneously unraveling outmoded narratives around representation in general. Early computer images, limited by technology, rely on symbolic forms of depiction, while present day output trends towards a concretism of ever increasing fidelity to an idea of reality. Farocki considers whether digital images will eventually displace filmic images – marking a displacement of the purportedly real by a human influenced idealization.
Parallele I (video still)
“In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.”
– Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki’s (1944-2014) oeuvre comprises more than 100 experimental and documentary films, essay, short and feature films. However, his complete oeuvre goes far beyond that. Farocki left behind extensive works of film and media theory still to be discovered, and for decades worked as a lecturer. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he expanded his cinematic practice with video installations. Farocki was an ethnographer of capitalist living environments, which he dissected and analyzed. Vital to his approach is the examination of the meaning of images, their genesis, and, in particular, the power structures inscribed in them.
Solo exhibitions of Harun Farocki’s work have been staged at Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MUMOK. Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz; MUAC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; National Museum of Modern Contemporary Art, Seoul; among many others.
