30. April 2009

Shopping is an everyday cultural act, taken for granted, inevitable, yet the result of a highly complex planning process. On the occasion of his lecture at the Städelschule Harun Farocki will show –besides his film “Nothing Ventured“- the documentary „The Creators of Shopping Worlds“ (2001), a film that explores the work of architects, experience designers and executive managers in charge of the creation of today’s shopping malls. Farocki filmed business meetings at which professionals brooded over architectural plans, and ‘walk-through’ simulations that are intended to optimize the flow of consumer traffic and maximize the saturation of the shopper’s visual field with ‘focus points’ designed to capture his or her attention.

The Berlin-based artist and film-maker Harun Farocki (born 1944 in Novy Jicen, Czechoslovakia) has produced over a hundred films and installations over the past 40 years: films that in their style and visual language do away with traditional genres and alternate between experiment, documentary and essay. Since producing the autobiographical video installation “Interface” for a group exhibition at the Musée d’art Villeneuve d’Ascq in Lille in 1995, Farocki – who is also active as an author, curator, teacher and as a screenwriter for the Berlin director Christian Petzold – has increasingly shown his work outside the cinema context in art institutions. Important stages were documenta X and documenta 12, where he showed “Still Life” in 1997 and “Deep Play” in 2007. His films have been shown in numerous retrospectives, such as at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris (2002) and MoMA in New York (2001). Since 2004 he teaches as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.