Harun Farocki, Comparison via a Third, 2007
A review of an exhibition at the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art in February-March 2011.
Comparison is the name of the game in this small but tightly focussed exhibition of three Harun Farocki films – yet it quickly becomes apparent that there are no stable coordinates from which to correlate and contrast here. Each of the three works on display – Comparison via a Third (2007), which gives the exhibition its name, I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000) and Immersion (2009) – initially seems to offer the viewer a simple exercise in drawing out similarities and differences. This sense is underlined by Faroki’s use of split-screen projection in all three pieces, but the initial premise of binary pairings is complicated by an increasingly uneasy awareness of multiple interrelations.
