Join Dara Birnbaum at the Miller ICA in Pittsburgh as she signs copies of her new book, Dara Birnbaum: Reaction, on September 25 at 12pm. The signing coincides with the opening weekend of the 58th Carnegie International and of her newly commissioned video installation, Journey: Shadow of the American Dream as part of the survey exhibition Dara Birnbaum: Journey.
For the new commission, Birnbaum works with digitized 16mm family footage taken by her father in the earliest years of her life. Birnbaum writes about the commission, “At my age of 75, there is the strong desire to review and bring to the viewer an understanding of growing up in this ‘shadow’ of WWII, the period when the American Dream was weaponized by the United States, after emerging ‘victorious’ from this world war.” In this politically polarized moment in America, Birnbaum turns her gaze toward the origins of her own life and the genesis of the powerful national narrative that has helped shape a fractured American consciousness.
This commission is a part of the exhibition Dara Birnbaum: Journey, a survey of Dara Birnbaum’s influential practice. This exhibition reviews the trajectory of Birnbaum’s penetrative interrogations of mass media during a period of time when technological transformations enabled seismic shifts in the mass consumption of information and entertainment.
The book, Dara Birnbaum: Reaction, was made in partnership with Dancing Foxes Press and CCS Bard. It includes original scholarship by leading critics and curators of moving image and media art and benefited greatly from the artist’s contribution and vision. This book examines Birnbaum’s key works and concepts to illustrate how much her practice has to teach in a technology and media-laden culture that demands constant participation and response.
Editors: Lauren Cornell, Elizabeth Chodos, Karen Kelly, Barbara Schroeder. Contributors: Erika Balsom, Giampaolo Bianconi, Jordan Carter, Elizabeth Chodos, Lauren Cornell, Alex Kitnick, Legacy Russell.
Dara Birnbaum: Journey was generously supported by Carnegie Mellon University Alumna and Emeritus Trustee, Patti Askwith Kenner (MM, 1966), the Fine Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, and major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
