Farocki in Memoriam: A Symposium

This symposium brings together a group of film scholars, theorists, curators, and educators to explore various topics related to the legacy of filmmaker Harun Farocki, marking one decade since his passing. Each presenter will share their independent research before joining a panel discussion to explore the intersections of their work. We invite you to join us for this enriching symposium and engaging panel conversation!
Following the panel, we will host the second screening in this series, Productive Images: Didacticsm and Learning from the Image.
Presenters and Panelists:
Nora M. Alter is Professor of comparative film and media arts at Temple University. She has published widely on German and European Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural and Visual Studies and Contemporary Art. She is author of several books including Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Chris Marker (2006), The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction (2018), and most recently Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence (2024). In 2019 she received an Art Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and in 2021 she was the Daimler Fellow in residence at the American Academy in Berlin.
Leo Goldsmith is a New York-based scholar and curator who works at the intersection of experimental moving-image media, documentary film, media ecologies, and digital culture. He completed his Ph.D. on found footage and moving-image circulation at the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He has taught film and media studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, Brooklyn College; Harvard University; Eugene Lang College, The New School; and Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Gertrud Koch is professor emerita for cinema studies at Freie Universität Berlin (1999-2020); since 2011 visiting professor at Brown University, USA. 2016-2018 she was professor II at Oslo University, Norway. She was the director of the interdisciplinary research center “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits” at Freie Universität Berlin from 2006-2014. From 1993-1999 she was head of a research group on Democracy, Media and the Public Sphere at the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies, Essen (KWI) and from 1991-1999 professor of film and TV studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research interests are the limits of political and historical representation, picture and film theory, techno-aesthetics and philosophy of art and film.
Evan Calder Williams is an Associate Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where he teaches the yearlong course Theory and Criticism in Contemporary Art, in addition to elective graduate seminars and a seminar on Disability Studies in the undergraduate Human Rights department. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and two forthcoming books, Why Fire and Manual Override: A Theory of Sabotage. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism. His essays have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogs and in journals. He is part of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine and is a founding member of the film and research collective 13BC. He received a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California Santa Cruz and was a Fulbright Fellow in Italy for his doctoral research. He is currently working on a book about sickness.
Moderator:
Zachary B. Feldman is a curator, writer, and scholar of media art and is currently the Curator of Visual Arts and Programs at Goethe-Institut New York. He holds a joint-Ph.D. in Comparative Media and German Studies from Vanderbilt University and was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2022-23. He has guest curated exhibitions and screenings at e-flux Screening Room (New York), Artists Space (New York), the National Gallery of Art (D.C.), and more.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Goethe-Institut New York, 30 Irving Place, New York, United States