Dara Birnbaum, Hostage, 1994. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC.

Dara Birnbaum, Taegukki, 2000. Courtesy Dara Birnbaum.

Dara Birnbaum, Tapestry: Elegy for Donna, 2000. Courtesy Dara Birnbaum.

SMAK
Stedelijk Museum
voor Actuele Kunst
Citadelpark
+ 32 9 221 17 03
Ghent
Dara Birnbaum
Retrospective:
the dark matter of media light
April 4-August 2, 2009

Dara Birnbaum (°1946 New York, USA) presents an emotionally loaded and highly critical insight into (American) society and more particularly into the way it is being portrayed by television. The prominent presence of ‘the woman’ as emotional being allows for a feminist interpretation of her work. Yet, unlike other contemporaries Birnbaum does not run diametrically counter to a male society affected by testosterone. Her work is a sustained search for a redefinition of what it can mean to be ‘a woman’ in a world evolving ever faster and overloaded with images.

Dara Birnbaum considers it a challenge to formulate a strong and well-founded commentary on a political as well as a social level, by means of new audiovisual techniques. Although she grew up in a climate of political crisis, she has still maintained her unfathomable sense for romanticism.

Parts of her personal archive will be opened up and films which were never shown before will be presented. At the same time a retrospective monograph will be compiled in which a choice selection of national and international authors will throw light on their view on Birnbaum’s oeuvre from various perspectives. The exhibition begins in the S.M.A.K. and will afterwards travel to Fundaçao Serralves (Porto, Portugal) amongst others.

Dara Birnbaum, born in 1946 in New York , USA, where she continues to live and work, uses video to reconstruct television imagery using as material such archetypal formats as quizzes, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her techniques involve the repetition of images and interruption of flow with text and music. She is also well known for forming part of the feminist art movement.

Her most prominent piece of video art is the 1978-1979 video art piece •Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman•. In this work she uses appropriated images of •Wonder Woman• to subvert the ideology and meaning embedded in the television series.

In 1979 she started to make fast-edited video collages from footage appropriated while working for a TV post-production unit. She participated in the 1985 Whitney Biennial.

Her 1994 six channel video installation Hostage has as its subject the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer in 1977.

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She also has works in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Dara Birnbaum, Taegukki, 2000. Courtesy Dara Birnbaum.