Harun Farocki: What Is Seen, What Is Made. Solo Exhibition at DOTMUSEUM
The DOTMUSEUM presents What Is Seen, What Is Made., an exhibition of major works by Harun Farocki.
Images have long been understood as a medium that represents the world. We believe that through images we perceive reality and read meaning within it. In this sense, the image functions like a window, thought to transparently convey the world.
However, Harun Farocki’s work fundamentally challenges this assumption. In his practice, images are not neutral records but the result of processes of selection, arrangement, and construction. Film scenes, industrial footage, surveillance images, and digital simulations are taken apart and reassembled, revealing the systems and relationships that operate within them. As a result, the question of the image shifts from “what it shows” to “how it is formed and how it functions.”
In today’s image environment, this shift becomes even more evident. Within surveillance systems, automated industrial settings, and digital simulations, images no longer presuppose a human gaze. They process and analyze themselves, functioning as part of systems that perform specific tasks. This operation continues without human intervention. Farocki described this as the “operational image.” Images are no longer tools of representation but function as mechanisms that organize and determine reality.
These conditions become more concrete within the context of place. Busan is a city shaped by overlapping histories of movement and settlement, emergence and disappearance. Its landscapes are not defined by a single present moment but exist as the result of multiple layers of time. Urban scenes are not simply given; they are selected, accumulated, and constructed. This structure resonates with the way images operate, leading us to recognize that what we believe we see is also part of a system.
Comprising six media works, the exhibition unfolds along this trajectory. Beginning with the selection of images and the act of seeing, it moves through the ways film scenes are constructed and the visual systems that organize the city, extending to virtual images generated in digital environments. Finally, it reaches historical images formed through repetition and accumulation. These works are connected within a continuous context.
Within this flow, viewers move beyond the position of simply looking at images and come to recognize themselves as situated within their structures. The experience of moving through the exhibition invites a reconsideration of familiar visual perceptions and leads to questions about how images construct and operate within reality.
