Dara Birnbaum

Fondazione Prada presents an extensive survey exhibition dedicated to the work of Dara Birnbaum from April 13 to September 25, 2023 (press preview on April 12) at the Osservatorio, its space located at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. A parallel exhibition will be on view at Prada Aoyama Tokyo from 1 June to 28 August 2023.

Osservatorio is Fondazione Prada’s centre devoted to visual experimentation and research focused on potential intersections and collisions between technologies and cultural expressions. It is a free-thinking platform open to reflection on various artistic and media languages and their impact in an ever-changing political and social landscape.

Curated by Barbara London, with Valentino Catricalà and Eva Fabbris, the exhibition offers different perspectives to understand the distinguished career of Dara Birnbaum (New York, 1946), an artist who consistently has challenged the precepts of art and mass media.

Dara Birnbaum received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Certificate in Video and Electronic Editing at the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research, New York. Her pioneering video, media, and installation work has addressed the ideological and aesthetic character of mass media imagery over the past four decades and has been considered fundamental to our understanding of the history of media art. She was one of the first artists to design complex and innovative installations that juxtapose imagery from multiple sources while integrating three-dimensional elements—large-scale photographs, sculptural, or architectural elements—into the work. She is known for her groundbreaking strategies and for using manipulated television footage.

The exhibition comprises a selection of single-channel videos, sound works, multi-channel installations, photographs, and 3-D specialized prints on Plexiglas as realized by the artist from 1975 to 2022. Dara Birnbaum reveals her deep exploration of the cultural intersections of video art, television, and consumer technologies and—among other themes—the gendered biases reflected in the representation of women in popular culture. The exhibition path conceived by the artist for the ground floor and the upper two levels of Osservatorio doesn’t follow a chronological order. However, by employing a carefully selected series of works, it illustrates the wide range of media and artistic languages employed by Birnbaum in her practice and explores the recurrent topics of her ongoing creative work.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication in the Quaderni series, published by Fondazione Prada, including an essay by the curator Barbara London and a conversation between Dara Birnbaum and the two associate curators Valentino Catricalà and Eva Fabbris.

Dara Birnbaum is the result of a partnership based on educational activities with the School of Digital Arts (SODA) in Manchester, UK.