Revisiting Harun Farocki: Labor, War, and Capital

Revisiting Harun Farocki: Labor, War, and Capital, is a retrospective program by the 7th Istanbul Experimental Film Festival at SALT Beyoğlu and İMALAT-HANE İ.M.Ç Project Space. Organized in collaboration with Antje Ehmann, the program traces Farocki’s sustained inquiry into the entanglements of labor, production and war as they are mediated through images. Screenings at İMALAT-HANE İ.M.Ç. Project Space will be on view from 12 to 23 May.

Across the selection of films, the factory and the battlefield emerge as continuous terrains structured by shared visual regimes—where observation, measurement, and control govern both the organization of work and the execution of violence. Farocki’s films map a genealogy of operational images: images that do not simply represent reality but actively intervene in it, shaping processes, decisions, and forms of life. From its inception, cinema itself appears as a vision machine—linking the factory, warfare, propaganda, and entertainment within a broader economy of images.

Within this expanded field, perception is progressively delegated from human observers to technical systems. Across aerial reconnaissance, industrial monitoring, and machine vision, images become tools of analysis and action, reorganizing landscapes, labor, and social relations. The shift toward automated forms of seeing marks a decisive transformation: no longer addressed primarily to human interpretation, images increasingly circulate between machines, producing new forms of intelligence and control.

Taken together, the films articulate a critical framework for understanding how images operate at the intersection of labor, war, and capital—linking human and machinic perception while foregrounding the infrastructures that continue to shape contemporary life.

Programming: Yavuz Gözeller & Aslı Seven

15 & 16 May 2026
Salt Beyoğlu Walk-in Cinema
15:30 – Images of the World and Inscription of War (75 min., 1988)
17:00 – As you See (72 min., 1986)
18:30 – Workers Leaving The Factory (36 min., 1995)

12–23 May 2026
İMALAT-HANE İ.M.Ç. Project Space
A Way (2005); Comparison Via A Third (2007);
Eye/Machine I (2000), Eye/Machine II (2000) & Eye/Machine III (2003)