HF | RG

The exhibition “H F | R G” brings together the visions of two important contemporary artists, Harun Farocki and Rodney Graham, whose work has a great deal in common, not least their film and video and their interest in the medium and its history and in self-representation.

Both will present film-based installations reflecting four themes that structure their respective bodies of work: the archive, the nonverbal, the machine (and devices), and editing. Both artists will produce a new work for this exhibition.

Rodney Graham was born in 1949 in Vancouver, where he studied the history of art, and where he still lives and works today. He began exhibiting in North America and Europe in 1980, and in 1992 he featured in Documenta IX in Kassel and represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In his films, videos, photographs, architectural models, books and musical scores, Graham explores the forms and devices determining our perception of art. He analyses the formal and narrative structures of different media in order to subvert them.

Harun Farocki was born in 1944 in Germany. He studied at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie in Berlin, where he currently lives and works. He began his career as a film director and was editor of “Filmkritik,” a magazine in which, from 1974 to 1984, he articulated an important set of theoretical ideas about the image. Employing a wide range of media (photographs, drawings, documentary images, films), his own work analyses the convergences of war, economics and politics within the social space. In parallel to this, since the early 1990s he has been making video tapes and installations concerned with the production and processing of images in the media and the institutions that disseminate them.

Exhibition curated by: Chantal Pontbriand

Exhibition organized with the support of Neuflize Vie,
global partner of the Jeu de Paume.

In partnership with the Centre culturel canadien,
the Goethe Institut Paris and A nous, Art Press, Blast, evene.fr,
Libération, Mouvement, parisart.com, Paris Première.

SOUVENIRS FROM EARTH TV is partnerning Jeu de Paume for the [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham] exhibition. Throughout the duration of the show, this unusual TV station will serve as an extension of the gallery by broadcasting a programme of films by Farocki and Graham on Freebox channel 129 every Monday, when the Jeu de Paume space is physically closed.