Harun Farocki: Wrestling with Images
Harun Farocki
Wrestling with Images
German filmmaker Harun Farocki began making films in the late 1960s amid a highly politicized cultural milieu. Citing the influence of such Marxist cultural practitioners as theater director Bertolt Brecht, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and film director Jean-Luc Godard, Farocki consistently addressed two principal subjects: the practices of labor and the production of images.
Farocki is particularly known for his explicitly political essay films, through which he examined these subjects while also openly confronting the inherently persuasive, manipulative properties of the cinematic medium. In sharp contrast to the explicit natureand strong authorial voice of the essay film, Farocki also used the genre of direct cinema, a kind of “fly-on-the-wall” filmmaking, in which the filmmaker’spoint of view is rarely revealed. Many of his direct-cinema works unobtrusively observe media productions, training sessions, and product demonstrations. In his later works, Farocki explored what he termed “operative images”—technical images created for military and surveillance purposes that were not necessarily intended for public consumption. As he phrased it, “[T]hese are images that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation.” With this work, Farocki prompts viewers to think about the powerful role of visual media in shaping our understanding of ourselves and others, as well as about the social and political systems that send images into the world.
Producer: Zhang Xina
Context Provider: Ma Yongfeng, Wu Xiaojun
Coordinator: Fu Lei
Project Assistant: Wang Rui, Zhang Shuo
Organizer: Cache Space
Supporting Institution: Beijing German Cultural Center · Goethe Institut
Special Thanks: Harun Farocki GbR
Project Date: December 22, 2018 - July 22,2019
Screening Venue: Cache Space, No. 11, Liaogezi, Qixing East Street, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Harun Farocki’s Film Screening + Panel Discussion:
Seven of about 100 films by Harun Farocki between 1967 and 2012 were carefully selected for three research-based screenings in Cache Space Beijing. The screening was divided into three sections: Political Essay and Image Uprising, Operational Images and Verbund，Labor Practice and Direct Film.
Harun Farocki’s Film Screening Schedule
December 22, 2018, 2-6 pm Screening + Panel Discussion
Regular Screening：December 22nd - January 26th, every Friday and Saturday 3-5pm
Political Essay and Image Uprising
1969 Inextinguishable Fire 25 minutes
1992 Videograms of A Revolution 106 minutes
April 6th, 2019, 2-6 pm, Screening + Panel Discussion
Operational Image and Verbund
1988 Images of the World and the Inscription of War 44 minutes
2003 War at a Distance 58 minutes
2012 Parallel I-IV Four-channel Video Installation 43 minutes
June 8th, 2019, 2-6 pm, Screening + Panel Discussion
Labor Practice and Direct Film
1995 Workers Leaving the Factory 36 minutes
2009 In Comparison 60 minutes
Exhibition: Harun Farocki: Wrestling with Images
Period: April 6th - June 6th, 2019
Exhibition Works:
Mainly show Harun Farocki's four-channel video installation "Parallel I-IV"
Video of panel discussions on Harun Farocki.
Harun Farocki Archives: Harun Farocki' s publications, catalogs, magazines, video collections, movie posters, etc.,
Political Essay and Image Uprising
December 22, 2018, 2-6 pm Screening + Panel Discussion
INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE (NICHT LöSCHBARESFEUER)
At the heart of Harun Farocki's politics is a special way of bearing witness to the present. From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, his perspective reflected and refracted the contemporary world in anasymmetrical and asynchronous, rather than closed and self-regulating way. Farocki takes up a subject only when it can be presented as a"Verbund" system, which is to say, when the dynamics of feedback, self-reference and self-monitoring put in circulation. This principle is demonstrated with exceptional simplicity and courage in his very first(surviving) film, 'Nicht löschbares Feuer' ('Inextinguishable Fire'), from1969.
The camera head on, frames Farocki himself in a static medium close-up, sitting by empty table in an otherwise empty room. In a monotone, he reads from an eye-witness report by a Vietnamese man of the methods used by the US military bombing raids. Finishing the report, Farocki suddenly speaks directly to the camera: "How can we show napalm in action? And how can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you'll close your eyes. First you'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close your eyes to the memory. Then you'll close your eyes to the facts. Then you'll close your eyes to the entire context." Then, Farocki takes a cigarette from the ashtray. As the camera slowly tracks into a close-up, he extinguishes the cigarette on the back of his hand. Over a still image, a sudden voice-off explains that a cigarette burns at roughly 500 degree Celsius, while napalm burns at around 4000 degree Celsius.
The scene's power stems from the openly acknowledged inadequacy and its radical incommensurability with the realities of the events to which it refers. The act makes the case for a poetics whereone image stands for another, a form that brings the unimaginable "into the picture." The film derives its moral authority and aestheticcredibility from the fact that the demonstration "cuts both ways": its gesture of auto-aggression is directed against Farocki himself as much as at the gest spectator. The feedback loop must include the artist's self-expression not as self-replicator, but as self-implicator.
Thomas Elsaesser
VIDEOGRAMS OF A REVOLUTION (VIDEOGRAMMEEINER REVOLUTION)
This reconstruction of the events of December 1989 in Romania, which led to the over throw of Nicolae Ceausescu, is created using found footage: live television transmission, censored material, amateur recordings, and coverage by foreign TV crews. The chronological and topological montage is commented on off-screen through succinct statements about the actual course of events and the production of images.
The double character of the events is clearly rendered. On the one hand, it takes a classical course. On December 21,the live broadcast of a Ceausescu speech is interrupted when part of the audience listening on-site refuses to play the role assigned them in the spectacle. The abandonment of the standard choreography reveals the unwillingness of the people to continue accepting the regime. The next day, the crowd storms the building from which the dictator spoke.
On the other hand, the overthrow takes place in a new way, communicated by the media. In the television studio, whichis also taken over, ideas of the nation, the return to religion, and the struggle of the demonstrators are discussed and summoned in varying constellations. As chaotically as these presentations take place, they follow the rules of direction of live TV. In the meantime, fights occur on the streets. For the cameras, the front lines are by no means apparent. In backrooms, in the presence of the cameras that are still tolerated, renegades ofthe old regime haggle over power.
A film like this could only be made in1990/1991, when the archives of the censored recordings were accessible and amateur material remained limited. Ten years later, the mountain of images created during such events has grown to such an extent that their selection becomes random. After all these years, ‘Videograms of a Revolution’ remains anaesthetically consistent testimony to a moment of historic upheaval.
Dietrich Leder
Panelists
Dong Shubao
Visiting scholar of École Normale Supérieure, associate professor of the Chinese Department, the School of Humanity and Law, North University of Technology. His research direction mainly focus on contemporary French philosophy and art philosophy, Chinese and Western comparative philosophy, Western literary theory. There are more than 30 papers and translations published in "Literature Research", "Foreign Literature", "Philosophy News" and other magazines, and there are monographs on "Rebellion of Image: The Thinking of French Contemporary Philosophy" (to be published). The translations include"Dongfeng", "Desert Island" and other texts, "Dialogue" and so on.
Fen Lei
Writer, publisher and curator. He has curated the Narrative Film Week in 2014 and the" Guy Debord Film Week" in 2015 in Hangzhou; also co-curated the"Write Everything: Rethinking Social Text and Art Practice" in 2016, the City Project of 11th Shanghai Biennale “Gu Shen Bian” in 2016-2017, “local Chronicles and Novel: Resident Writing Exhibition” in Bishan, Anhui in 2018.
Li Juchuan
born in 1964 in Shashi, Hubei. 1986, he graduated from Department of Urban Planning of Wuhan Urban Construction Institute. 1986-2006, he taught successively in Department of Architecture inseveral Universities. Since 1990s he has been applying himself to the architectural practice carried out through performance, video and site-specificinstallation. His works also involve writing, lecturing, pedagogy and exhibition. Currently he works and lives in Wuhan.
Context Providers:
Ma Yongfeng
Artist, context provider, currently living in Berlin and Beijing. The self-organized Forget Art has curated aseries of social intervention-based projects in different public spaces, mainly through guerrilla, flexible and amateurist action and mobilization which triesto create margin and resistance in the increasingly institutionalized contemporary art system. The curatorial projects include Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse in 2010; Save Amateurism! and GuerrillaLiving Syndrome: A Social Micro-practice of Alternative Living in 2011; Forget Art Fair curated in 2011 was featured in the cover of Journal of Curatorial Studies (Volume 4, Number 1,2015) ; recently curated projects include Digital Samplers, or A New Generation Deep Dive Into Internet Superposition in The Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017 and Harun Farocki: Wrestling with Images in Cache Space in 2018-2019.
Wu Xiaojun
Graduated from Nanjing Art University in1988 and currently lives and works in Beijing. Since 1990s, he has been separated his identities in painting, sculpture, photography, words, slogan, action, installation and other forms of art. With a large amount of historical documents and political and social events he has tried to build autonomous art subjectivity with the new ideological stage and social model and make it to be adaily aesthetic action. His main job is to reconstruct art as a emancipatory force in the form of action and dialogue in the near future.
Harun Farocki "Parallel I-IV"
Wrestlingwith Image : Farocki Research Series 02
Display Works: Four-channel video installation "Parallel I-IV"
Opening Ceremony: April 13th, 4 - 7pm
Exhibition Time: April 13th - June 15th, 2019
Opening Hours: 2-5 pm every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday
Organizing Institution: Cache Space
Supporting Institution: Beijing German Cultural Center · Goethe Institut China
Special Thanks: Harun Farocki GbR
Venue: No. 11, Liaogezi, Qixing East Street, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Harun Farocki's research archive presentation: showcases collections of Harun Farocki's publications, catalogues, magazines, video products, film posters, video materials, etc. This event and future publications will collabrated with Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin.
PARALLEL (PARALLELE)
Harun Farocki draws our attention to the way in which images, technologies, and systems of representation define social and political space, consciousness, subjectivities, structures of feeling, andideologies. In this film, Farocki juxtaposes the history of computer-based animation with elements of art history. In thirty years, computer-generated images and animations have evolved from simple symbolic forms into images that aspire to perfect simulation, to seemingly outperform cinematographic and photographic representations of social and natural reality.
Mimesis has become a matter of generative algorithms, technology is increasingly capable of calculating, predicting, and controlling complex processes from manufacturing, to war, to emotional experiences in the animated worlds of mass entertainment. In Farocki's investigation into the frontiers of innovation in current image-technologies, reality is no longer the measure of the always-imperfect image; instead, the virtual image increasingly becomes the measure of an always-imperfect actuality. With the "ideal-typical" image, representation seeks to overcome lived reality by constructing, monitoring, and governing it.
‘Parallel’ questions the notion of "progress" that underlies histories of art and representation basedon a linear, evolutionary progression from imperfect re-presentation (mimesis) to more accurate, complex, and perfect forms. ‘Parallel’ is like an interrogation of possible other stories, evolutions, or reverse-evolutions of which the image-surfaces of digital animation and their underlying generative algorithms speak.
Anselm Franke
Harun Farocki’s Film Screening + Panel Discusssion:
Operational Images in Algorithmic Governance
2-6 pm, April 19th, 2019, Screening + Panel Discussion
Images of the World and the Inscription ofWar 44 mins 1988
War at a Distance 58 mins 2003
IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR
According to a basic idea of this film, visual thinking expresses itself in a particular age through the specific use of its vision machines. Starting from the invention of aerial photography, originally used in the realm of architecture, 'Images of the World and the Inscription of War' explores the complexity of certain rule systems within which such techniques of measurement are used. Harun Farocki develops an archaeology oftechnical images in which attention is not so much given to things seen in civilian or military contexts at certain points in the film, but to what becomes visible by using a medium. In so doing, the ambivalence of the term Aufklärung becomes clear: as both a form of enlightenment a form of military reconnaissance
Through the way in which the film makes images of control and surveillance from various historical and social contexts turn around a blind spot, it links them to the deadly virtuality of the photographic. Through repetitions, thematic series, and constant reframing, a gap gradually becomes apparent between two moments of viewing an aerial photograph from World War II. In the comparison, we recognize historical, epistemological, and ethical dimensions of the points of view in question: the visual regime of the American army, whose pilots shot photographs of Auschwitzin 1944, is different from that under which two CIA agents undertook private research in 1977 in the wake of the TV series ‘Holocaust’
The film emphasizes the materiality and the peculiarity of technical images by showing them within the spaces and arrangements they belong to: in the context of archives, albums, the media, orother structures. Farocki's sensual thinking becomes apparent in a"lateral" montage of images and commentary, aimed at depicting displays of visual measurement and topographical procedures as dialectical constellations of reconnaissance and pursuit, and as specific framings of the human body.
Christa Blümlinger
WAR AT A DISTANCE
In 1991, when images of the Gulf Warflooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearingswas to change forever our way of deciphering what we see.
The image is no longer used only astestimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. This is the central premise of War at a Distance, which continues the deconstruction of claims to visual objectivity Harun Farocki developed in his earlier work.
With the help of archival and original material, Farocki sets out in effect to define the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and sheds light on how the technology of war finds applications in everyday life.
Antje Ehmann
Panelists
Alessandro Rolandi
Studied Experimental Theatre and film-making with Dominic Defazio, He has been living and working in Beijing since 2003, as a multimedia and performance artist, director, curator, researcher, writer and lecturer. His work focuses on social intervention and relational dynamics to expand the notion of art practice beyond existing structures, spaces and hierarchies and engage directly with reality in multiple ways. He is the founder and director of the Social Sensibility at Bernard Controls in Beijing and Paris in 2011.
Cong Feng
Poet and film author and practitioner. The editorial board of "The Film Author" magazine, the main film worksare " Doctor Ma’s Clinic ", "Unfinished Life History", "The Room with Hair", "Land 1: Guest", "Land 2: Soft Stream".
Xu Ruiyu
Curator, writer, and translator. She graduated with a M.A. from Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in 2018. Her particular interest lies in the field of moving image, and new media art. Her theoretical interest focuses especially on media theory, and reflections onand critiques of speculative realism and new materialism. Xu Ruiyu is a regular contributor to artforum.com.cn. She curated the exhibition Counting the Waves (CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, NY), 2018.
Context Providers:
Ma Yongfeng
Artist, context provider, currently living in Berlin and Beijing. The self-organized Forget Art has curated aseries of social intervention-based projects in different public spaces, mainly through guerrilla, flexible and amateurist action and mobilization which triesto create margin and resistance in the increasingly institutionalized contemporary art system. The curatorial projects include Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse in 2010; Guerrilla Living Syndrome: A Social Micro-practice of Alternative Living in 2011; recently curated projects include Digital Samplers in The Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017 and Harun Farocki: Wrestling with Images in Cache Space in 2018-2019.
Wu Xiaojun
Graduated from Nanjing Art University in 1988 and currently lives and works in Beijing. Since 1990s, he has been separated his identities in painting, sculpture, photography, words, slogan, action, installation and other forms of art. With a large amount of historical documents and political and social events he has tried to build autonomous art subjectivity with the new ideological stage and social model and make it to be a daily aesthetic action. His main job is to reconstruct art as a emancipatory force in the form of action and dialogue in the near future.
Producer: Zhang Xina
Context Provider: Ma Yongfeng, Wu Xiaojun
Coordinator: Fu Lei
Project Assistant: Wang Rui, Zhang Shuo
Organizer: Cache Space
Supporting Institution: Beijing GermanCultural Center · Goethe Institut China
Special Thanks: Harun Farocki GbR
Project Date: December 22, 2018 - June 16,2019
Screening Venue: No. 11, Liaogezi, Qixing East Street, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Wrestling with Image : Farocki Research Series 03
Harun Farocki’s Film Screening + Panel Discusssion:
Labor Practice and Direct Film
2-6 pm, May 25th, 2019, Screening + Panel Discussion
1995 Workers Leaving the Factory 36minutes
2009 In Comparison 60 minutes
The films will be on display till June.15th
Opening Hours: 2-5 pm every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 3-5pm
Organizing Institution: Cache Space
Venue: No. 11, Liaogezi, Qixing East Street, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
WORKERS LEAVINGTHE FACTORY
In 1995, Harun Farocki recalls a scene from 1895 and traces out its repetition over the course of film history:'Workers Leaving the Factory'. What Farocki retrieves proves this shot to be aprimal scene of cinema, as a spectacular effort of looking away, of ignoring, of overseeing. 'La Sortie Des Usines Lumières à Lyon', as the original title goes, female workers wearing summer dresses, male workers, office employees, a bicycle, and a dog emerge from the darkness of the factory into the bright sunlight and disperse, some quickly, some hesitantly, into open of the hors-champs, off screen. Referring to repetitions of this constellation in fiction and documentary films, Farocki efficiently lists the elements that make the motif a historical topos: the supposed transition from the sphere of production into public space, while a camera is obviously located opposite the factory gate.
A deployment surveillance is integrated into the scene. Movement is re corded, but no worker's movement. The particular swallows the political in filmic fiction. While the transformation of people into individuals is shown, the damage they endure through procedures of production is not. The political the films is either ignited by affect or notat all. Again and again, cinema focuses on the location in front of the factory, but refuses to shoot work itself. The space facing the factory becomes something of a secondary stage of history, the commentary remarks. Yet its insisting presence in cinema's stories hints at the fact that something must have happened there once. Violence is insistent throughout the images. The violence that is expected at the factory gate evokes the idea of resistance, strike, and struggle, while none of this is actually visible. The missing counter-shot, invisible cuts, gaps between shots and ellipses of commentary reveal the fact of an alternative, a missed possibility in history: the workers could have chosen to stay at the factory, appropriate technologies and redistribute production in a reasonable way.
In his film 'Workers Leaving the Factory', Harun Farocki examines the politics memory and remembering in the age of the cinema. Which archival order can organize images which gain their meaning from gaps and lacks? What kind of historiography is made of processes that simultaneously hide and reveal? History in cinema appears at the margins of the field of vision. At least workers have not left cinema, and even the off-screen space is related to the production process. Today, we know that they are off to a park.
Ute Holl
IN COMPARISON
The built environment is the most direct and tangible product of our social-political reality. The complex operations and activities that lead to its realization are critically examined in Harun Farocki's film 'In Comparison'. He observes the different ways in which bricks are manufactured in contemporary Africa, India and Europe, recording adiversity of labor realities in twenty different brick production sites. The images show differences not only in manual, industrial and technological building methods, but also in the local environments. By placing the images side by side (a filmic brickwork in itself) to construct another image, Farocki gives an elaborate insight into evolving global world of extreme economic contrasts, cultural correspondences, and historical entanglements.
In Gando (Burkina Faso) an entire village community, including children, build a hospital with handmade mud bricks. In Mumbai (India), back breaking semi-industrialized concrete production is carried out mostly by women. A plant in Leers (France) with an annular kiln dates back to 1945; it has been operated by Moroccan workers ever since. Heat-insulating clay bricks are produced in Dachau-Pellheim (Germany) where a blue-collar worker operates computer-run machinery. In Toutipakkam (India) group of western students examine the local building tradition, striking economic model involving manpower only. In Zurich (Switzerland) a robot translates digital image into stone; the fully automatic production process does entirely without human interaction.
Hila Peleg
Panelists
Liu Weiwei
Bornin Shandong in 1988, he lives in the urban suburbs. Most of his art practices and projects are carried out in social spaces and initiated events. Solo exhibition including Stand at Ease / 2013 Chongqing; Waste route / 2014Shanghai; Pimp / 2015 Shanghai; Private life / 2016 Beijing; Unwelcome people /2017 Shanghai, etc. Participating projects: Residents / 2016 Guangzhou; Flying together /2015 Gansu; Zhongtai Project / 2015 Xi'an; 5+1=6/2014 Beijing; Provincial Youth / 2011 ~ Chongqing.
Sang Tian
Thee ditor-in-chief of "RANDIAN" bilingual magazine, born in Zhejiang in 1978, he majored in Chinese literature and also studied art in Germany, he has shared his time as a gallerist, furniture designer, secretary, teacher andgallery manager. Since 2012, he has worked in "Art Times" and"RANDIAN" Magazine, engaged in art criticism and editing. Mainly concerned with institutional criticism and related social art.
Context Providers:
Ma Yongfeng
Artist, context provider, currently living in Berlin and Beijing. The self-organized Forget Art has curated a series of social intervention-based projects in different public spaces, mainly through guerrilla, flexible and amateurist action and mobilization which triesto create margin and resistance in the increasingly institutionalized contemporary art system. The curatorial projectsinclude Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse in 2010; Save Amateurism! and Guerrilla Living Syndrome: A Social Micro-practice of Alternative Living in 2011; Forget Art Fair curated in 2011 was featured in the cover of Journal of Curatorial Studies (Volume 4, Number1,2015) ; recently curated projects include Digital Samplers, or A New Generation Deep Dive Into Internet Superposition in The Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017 and Harun Farocki: Wrestling with Images in Cache Space in 2018-2019.
Wu Xiaojun
Graduated from Nanjing Art University in1988 and currently lives and works in Beijing. Since 1990s, he has been separated his identities in painting, sculpture, photography, words, slogan, action, installation and other forms of art. With a large amount of historica ldocuments and political and social events he has tried to build autonomous art subjectivity with the new ideological stage and social model and make it to be a daily aesthetic action. His main job is to reconstruct art as a emancipatory force in the form of action and dialogue in the near future.
Producer: Zhang Xina
Context Provider: Ma Yongfeng, Wu Xiaojun
Coordinator: Fu Lei
Project Assistant: Wang Rui, Zhang Shuo
Organizer: Cache Space
Supporting Institution: Beijing German Cultural Center · Goethe Institute China
Special Thanks: Harun Farocki GbR
Project Date: December 22, 2018 - June 16,2019
Screening Venue: No. 11, Liaogezi, Qixing East Street, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Digital Samplers, or A New Generation Deep Dive into Internet Superposition
Digital Samplers, or A New Generation Deep
Dive into Internet Superposition.
Does the internet really exist? In what forms, and through what operations?
Today, the spectacle of the post-digital shaped by the internet feels omnipresent. Both as a new model of digital commoning and as an invisible “internet collective unconscious,” it increasingly infiltrates our everyday thought and saturates contemporary life, heavy with inertia.
Digital colonialism, propelled by algorithmic aesthetics, continually replicates, disperses, and dominates the post-digital body amid a collective collapse of the entire online world—at once invading and governing a hyperlinked landscape that is perpetually breaking down and repairing itself. For art practitioners in the post-media age, creative work increasingly resembles automatic digital sampling: by day and night, endlessly cutting, remixing, and reassembling across social media and internet platforms, caught in a euphoric loop of image reproduction.
Internet broadcasts and blog platforms proliferate in seemingly boundless excess. As the tools available to artists—and even the institutions that house them—appear more and more like castles in the air, the network continues to gather countless amateur samplers. They emerge from images only to return to them, compelled to perform, create, and inhabit ever-new virtual spaces. For contemporary artists, this creates an acute anxiety of identity.
The internet itself exists in a paradoxical state: already dead and yet still alive; absent and yet omnipresent. Much like quantum superposition, it is at once there and not there—a condition of uncertainty. Only when consciously observed does this superposition collapse into a concrete reality.
Immersed in these networked states of simultaneity, interconnection, and entanglement, the new generation has, from the outset, formed an intense dependence on the virtual. Like the interplay between the physical body and the multiplicity of virtual identities behind the screen—or between the “likes” on social media and the indifference of the offline world—digital samplers inhabit fragmented, overlapping realities. On these new platforms, which operate as capitalist colonies, they experience a deep sense of disjunction and fragmentation at the heart of lived experience.
Forget Art 2009-2014
What is Forget Art
It is a guerrilla intervention-based organization initiated by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng at the end of 2009, It is a series of situation-based alternative tactics in self-institutional forms, it is often mistaken for a regular art collective, it could also be one collective light action almost did not happen, an agency of radical social practice, a series of unconventional interviews, a effort of saving amateurism, an art fair with just one booth, or a pursuit of sense of incompletion, a indeliberate social media art experiment, or it is the evolution of concept from micro-intervention to micro-practice, from micro-practice to micro-resistance.
Forget Art Fair curated by Ma Yongfeng in 2011 was featured in the cover of Journal of Curatorial Studies (Volume 4, Number 1, 2015) and one of articles Interventionist Curatorial and Display Practices in Beijing, “By staging a standard art fair display unit in a commercial gallery, Ma presents a meta-curatorial readymade satirizing the Chinese art market’s international success. His art fair, though, was limited to one booth – a gesture conflating promotion with institutional critique that typifies for us the paradox and possibility of exhibitions in contemporary China. ”
地点：龙泉洗浴
Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse
“龙泉洗浴”是草场地离画廊区最近的一家澡堂，很多人可能已经多次经过它，不过并没有太过留意。forget art将会重新利用这个特定的“公共性”私密空间，试图重新发现和定义这个空间的属性和存在于其中的特定语境。事实上什么都不会改变，我们只是以一种低姿态的可忽略的美学观在其中展开有针对性的“微干预”，从赋予特定意义的现成品到情境的重新抽离，从声音和记忆的关系到物体中的时间性……..
Dragon Fountain is the public bathhouse closer to the gallery area at Caochangdi, many people may have passed it several times, but not pay too much attention on it. forget art will re-use this particular "public" private space, we are trying to rediscover and redefine the attribute of this space and the presence of a specific context in which. In fact nothing will change, we are just attemting to make some site-specific "micro intervention" which embody an aesthetics of low-profile and ignorance. From readymade endowed with specific meaning to detached situation from daily life; from relationship between memory and voice to timing factor of found objects ... ... ..
策划：马永峰
主办：forget art 龙泉洗浴
Curated by Ma Yongfeng
Organized by forget art & Dragon Fountain Bathhouse
艺术家：
Alessandro Rolandi（意）+ 杨心广 + Yam Lau（加）+ 吴小军 + 马永峰 + 盛剑锋 + 石玩玩 + 黎薇 + 王光乐 + 邵译农 & 慕辰 + 吴迪 + 赵一浅 + 何意达 + Ulrike Johannsen（奥）+ 梁冰 + 刘斌 + 黄佳 + Barbara Balfour（加）+ 杨光南 + 徐小国 + 蔡卫东 + 陈曦 & 张雪瑞 + 任波 + 高铭 + 郭工 + Stephanie Shepherd（加）+ 李博 + 高峰 + 乔星月 + 高瑜 + 邓大非 + 杜辉 + Michael Yuen（澳）+ 杜瑞清 + 陈督兮 + 陶辉 + 傅玮佳等
开幕时间：2010年9月6日下午3点－7点 仅此一天!
地点：北京市朝阳区崔各庄乡草场地龙泉洗浴（红一号院正门望北过十字路口50米左边）
联系电话：13810360600
衣冠整齐者拒绝入内，着内衣和浴袍者优先！
Artist: Alessandro Rolandi, Yang Xinguang, Yam Lau, Wu Xiaojun, Ma Yongfeng, Sheng Jianfeng, Shi Wanwan, Li Wei, Wang Guangle, Shao Yinong & Mu Cheng, Wu Di, Zhao Yiqian, He Yida, Ulrike Johannsen, Liang Bing, Liu Bin, Huang Jia, Barbara Balfour, Yang Guangnan, Xu Xiaoguo, Cai Weidong , Chen Xi & Zhang Xuerui, Ren Bo, Gao Ming, Guo Gong, Stephanie Shepherd, Li Bo, Gao Feng, Qiao Xingyue, Gao Yu, Deng Dafei, Du Hui, Michael Yuen, Du Ruiqing, Chen Duxi, Taohui, Fu Weijia.
Opening: 3pm-7pm, September 6, 2010 just one day!
Venue: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, Beijing(walk towards north for 100 meters when you arrive at the front door of Red No.1 Yard)
Phone: 13810360600
dress yourself down, otherwise you are not welcome to come in, underwear and bathrobe are preferable!
Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse in Sep. 2010 has been nominated BEST OF 2010-The Artists’ Artists by ARTFORUM and 2010 Top Ten Exhibitions by BlouinArtinfo.
It is “A show where no works were labeled and most blended right into the context of its non-art site, this exhibition, curated by Ma Yongfeng, is only one example of a younger circle operating apart from previous models of contemporary Chinese art.”