American video artist Dara Birnbaum has her first UK solo show in South London Gallery till the February 12.
Ben Luke informs that “Gallery’s main space is Arabesque (2011), a video installation which feels modish, with vast screens in an elegant architectural space, and material from YouTube. On the first floor, meanwhile, are several mid-Seventies videos, themselves archetypically of their time: edgy, handheld, full of social politics and a spare, consciously amateurish technique.”
Birnbaum’s provocative video works are among the most influential and innovative contributions to the contemporary discourse on art and television. In her videotapes and multi-media installations, Birnbaum applies both low-end 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 televisual 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. (From Electronic Arts Intermix catalogue.)
Dara Birnbaum was born in 1946 in New York where she lives and works. She is especially famous for her uses of 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.
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