Dara Birnbaum started making art that was politically and critically relevant in the mid-1970s. Her work today is as contemporary and up-to-date as it was in the 1970s when she questioned society with her first video works. For more than 30 years Birnbaum has been provoking questions as to the way we look at political events, and how we are influenced and manipulated by images, television and the media in general. Today we are still searching for our place between such different digital phenomena as Facebook, Netlog and Twitter.
In her videotapes and multi-media installations, Birnbaum applies both low and high-end video technology to subvert, critique or deconstruct the power of mass media images and gestures to define mythologies of culture, history and memory. Through a dynamic tele-visual language of images, music and text, she exposes the media’s embedded ideological meanings and posits video as a means of giving voice to the individual.
Previous major retrospective exhibitions of Birnbaum’s work have been presented at the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria and the Norrtälje Konsthall, Sweden. Retrospective screenings include The American Film Institute, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.; Kunsthaus, Zurich and Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland. She has also exhibited in: documenta VII, VIII and IX, as well as numerous Venice Biennales. Solo international exhibitions of her work include: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Jewish Museum, New York; IVAM, Valencia; and the Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal.