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Dara Birnbaum

by E-Slant Team

Retrospective: the dark matter of media light

S.M.A.K.

Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Citadelpark, 9000 Gent, Belgium

April 4, 2009 - September 6, 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.

Posted by E-Slant Team on 8/03