EVENTS
A Lecture by Dara Birnbaum (Artists
14/11/2007 – 15/11/2007
Dara Birnbaum
CANCELLED. Unfortunately Dara Birnbaum has had to cancel her visit to CENDEAC due to unforseen circumstances.
The central theme of Birnbaum's work is the opportunity offered by video to reconstruct television imagery using as material such archetypal formats as quizzes, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her basic technique is to arrest the flow of images, and to repeat parts thereof, until they begin to live a life of their own in repetition, and to disrupt our interpretation with texts and music. Although television employs the same technology and basically the same kind of screen as video art, Birnbaum wants to investigate, like other video artists, the differences and similarities between the viewing experience at home and when the monitor is located in a public space, such as a gallery.
Throughout her career, which began in the late 1970s, Dara Birnbaum has worked with video art in New York. Initially, Birnbaum studied architecture and town planning, but switched to studying painting in the San Francisco Art Institute. On returning to New York, she continued her education in the New School of Social Research, where she concentrated on video art.
Birnbaum's production consists primarily of video art and installations. Her videos of the late 1970s and early 1980s are variations on the same theme, all of them reinterpreting the various formats and the "language" of television using different techniques.
In the mid-1980s, Birnbaum began a large, three-part video work and installation based on the myth of Faust. The works in the series were Damnation of Faust: Evocation (1983), Damnation of Faust: Will-O'-The-Wisp (1985) and Damnation of Faust: Charming Landscape (1987). In these works, Birnbaum investigated the myth of femininity through personal and social experiences. In 1989, she completed a large-scale interactive work in Atlanta involving 25 monitors entitled Rio videowall. Her latest public work is the installation Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990/1999).
Birnbaum's work has been seen in countless festivals and video art exhibitions and events throughout the world. She visited Finland in 1990 for the second.