Harun Farocki (9 January 1944 – 30 July 2014) was a German filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film.
Farocki was born as Harun El Usman Faroqhi in Neutitschein (now Nový Jičín) in the Czech Republic. His father, Abdul Qudus Faroqui, had immigrated to Germany from India in the 1920s. His German mother had been evacuated from Berlin due to the Allied bombing of Germany. He simplified the spelling of his surname as a young man. After World War II, Farocki grew up in India and Indonesia before the family resettled in Hamburg in 1958.
Farocki, who was deeply influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) from 1966 to 1968. There, in the mid-1960s, he began making films which, from the very beginning, were non-narrative essays on the politics of imagery.
Farocki made over 90 films, including film essays, documentaries, shorts and feature films. His practice combined essay film, political analysis, media archaeology, and installation art. Farocki was particularly concerned with the politics of images, how images are produced, circulated, and operationalized within systems of power such as the military, industry, surveillance, and advertising.
From 1974 to 1984, when its publication ceased, Farocki edited the magazine Filmkritik, which served as a crucial forum for politically engaged film theory in West Germany. From 1993 to 1999, Farocki taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He later was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In his 2000-2003 three-part installation, Eye/Machine, Farocki coined the term "operational image".
His 2007 twelve-channel video installation Deep Play, first shown at documenta 12, used footage, computer-generated visualizations and data from the 2006 FIFA World Cup final.
Farocki's works Serious Games I-IV (2009-10) are a series of four video installations featuring footage recorded at different US military sites where computer-game technology was used to train soldiers, as well as treat them for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The series was ranked No. 20 in Frieze's list of "The 25 Best Works of the 21st Century".
Farocki's work was included in the 2004–05 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In 2006, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna presented a retrospective of Farocki's film and video work. The programme included 36 works as well as a carte blanche selected by Farocki and Antje Ehmann.
The following year, Farocki participated in documenta 12 in Kassel, where he presented the twelve-channel installation Deep Play.
A first major UK retrospective of his films was held at Tate Modern in 2009.
Also in 2009, the Jeu de Paume in Paris presented a retrospective of Farocki's films. It ran alongside HF | RG, an exhibition bringing together works by Farocki and Rodney Graham.
From October 2010 to January 2011, the Kunsthaus Bregenz presented Soft Montages, a retrospective of Farocki's installations and films. The exhibition included works from the Serious Games series as well as earlier multi-channel installations.
The 2011 exhibition "Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance)" at the Museum of Modern Art was the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Farocki's work in a U.S. museum. It featured a major acquisition of around 36 works spanning four decades, including the U.S. premiere of Serious Games I–IV and seminal works such as Videograms of a Revolution.
Farocki's works were exhibited in a major showcase in Brazil at Paço das Artes in 2015, curated by Jane de Almeida.
In 2016, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona presented Harun Farocki. Empathy, an exhibition of his films and video installations curated by Antje Ehmann and Carles Guerra.
A further exhibition of Farocki's work was held in Brazil at the Moreira Salles Institute in 2019, curated by Antje Ehmann and Heloisa Espada.
Farocki's first wife, Ursula Lefkes, whom he married in 1966, died in 1996.