For Farocki, the distinction between the documentary and the fictional film lay in the movement of the camera as it tracks its subject: the subject is unpredictable, the documentarian pursues. At times the image is missed by a few frames. The perspective is corrected and returned. This logic of pursuit in Harun Farocki’s Parallel 1-4 (2012-2014) is tested as the camera disappears in the face of the computer-generated images that are being documented. What is being tracked here is not a visible subject as such, but the operational figure of the coder, of the hardware engineer. The missed frames are replaced by the simulation error, the badly executed routine, when the reality-effect momentarily slips away from the real.

In Pursuit of Images looks to these moments and explores how different techniques of derealisation are utilised in documentary practice. The works range from Anand Patwardhan’s revisionist rereading of Ramayana’s founding myth as a docu-music video in We Are Not Your Monkeys (1996) to IM Heung-soon’s Short Dream: Short Dream Ⅱ - Invitation to Happiness (2008/9) addressing the history of the Vietnam War from the perspective of those whose dreams still reside within it.

As found material from archives, tele-visual news and user generated media are used to portray historic events, the documentation of these mediatised records, of a simulated reality, become ever harder to comprehend as in the work of Maha Maamoun’s Night Visitor: The Night of Counting the Years (2011), Naeem Mohaiemen’s Abu Ammar is Coming (2016) and are subverted through Alia Farid’s use of the autobiographical in Theatre of Operations (The Gulf War Seen from Puerto Rico) (2017). The image’s verifiability becomes a tool that is mobilised in Kamal Aljafari’s re-montage of American and Israeli 1960s action films of Jaffa in Recollection (2015), a method to reclaim and recollect the city’s disappearing Palestinian identity through the documents of its perpetrator.

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy’s A Terrible Fiction (2019) contest the racialised origin stories that support the scientific objectivity so central to the military-industrial complex that Farocki’s Serious Games 1-4 (2009-2010) documents. Thinking through the role of contemporary art in Farocki’s first video installation, Interface (1995), and by bringing together artists working in moving-image toexpose the racial, social and political regimes of image production, In Pursuit of Images questions the possibilities that documentary may still provide.

In Pursuit of Images will include commissioned work: Letter to Harun: a Postscript to What Everybody Knows by Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri and Wound Contra Empire by Edwin Nasr & Bassem Saad that will be performed on February 14 as part of the In 20/20 Symposium.

Curated by Moad Musbahi, as part of In 20:20 directed by Ana Maria Nicolaescu

Exhibition Design by Transformer Office

Programme Assistants: Jasmine Abu Hamdan and Paulina Burzynska

Image Credit: Video still from "Parallel II" 2014