From Fotofest:

"Featuring Tony Cokes, Harun Farocki, Dan Graham, and Rea Tajiri

Curated by Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Amy Sadao

FotoFest is pleased to present the exhibition, I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out a warning, on view April 8–30, 2022 at Silver Street Studios, room 206. The three-part exhibition features four films by artists and filmmakers whose work has been inspirational to the conceptual development of the upcoming FotoFest Biennial 2022 exhibition If I Had a Hammer. The presented films explore, through varied methods and approaches, the ways the circulation of images both inform and reflect social movements, political ideologies, and cultural imaginaries.

Harun Farocki’s film, Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) is a meditation on the relationships between image production, observation, and conscious recognition through the analysis of a series of ariel photographs taken during American reconnaissance missions in WWII Europe. These images are among the first images taken by the allies that prove the existence of the Nazi death camps. But, as Farocki’s film reveals, military photo-analysists did not recognize or notice the camp captured in these images until decades later, in 1977. Farocki uses this example of image capture and analysis as a starting point from which to examine the ways historical context, memory, and perception inform our ability to decode visual information.

Dan Graham’s video essay, Rock My Religion (1983–84) draws on histories of Native American, Shaker, and Puritan religions to propose a relationship between forms of born-again spirituality and the embrace of rock-n-roll as religion in the mid-twentieth century. Weaving together images, text, sound, and video, Graham compares the transcendental performances, embrace of idolatry, and utopian ideals practiced by both religious communities and suburban teens. At the heart of Rock My Religion is an investigation of how ideological codes and historical narratives are transformed by contemporary cultural movements.

Black Celebration (A Rebellion against the Commodity) by artist Tony Cokes offers an engaged reading of uprisings that occurred in Black neighborhoods in Watts, Boston, Newark, and Detroit in the 1960s. By juxtaposing text from Guy Debord’s “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” newsreel footage, and commentary by pop culture icons, Cokes offers a counter-narrative to mainstream discourse surrounding looting, rioting, and acts of communal resistance.

In History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, artist Rea Tajiri offers a critique of authoritative and collective historicization by positioning accounts of her family’s experience in Japanese internment camps against Hollywood reenactments, newsreel footage, and government propaganda that reinforce Eurocentric narratives of post-Pearl Harbor America. Tajiri’s film suggests that visual affirmation, provided through the use and circulation of images, is always subjective. She states, “There are things which have happened in the world while there were cameras watching, things we have images for. There are other things which have happened while there were no cameras watching, which we restage in front of cameras to have images of.” History and Memory asks the audience to consider the contexts and conditions within which images are produced, paying special attention to the role of erasure and omission in the formation of historical narratives.

Together, the artists in I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out a warning demonstrate techniques of navigating the entanglement of images and ideologies, while underscoring the consequences of critical and cultural intervention on hegemonic systems and structures such as religion, mass-media, and capitalism. The films will be presented at Silver Street Studios in room 206 and will be played on loop, each day, starting at 10AM."