Curated by Giel Vandecaveye

With this eagerly awaited retrospective, international audiences will finally have the opportunity to consider Dara Birnbaum’s impressive development over the past thirty years. SMAK’s Giel Vandecaveye here gathers approximately thirty works by the creator of the now-classic feminist appropriationist video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79, including multichannel installations, videos, posters, and other ephemera made between 1975 and 2006. Featuring essays by Johanna Burton, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Michael Newman, the exhibition’s comprehensive catalogue will provide a history of Birnbaum’s engagements with video, television, public sites, and media outlets and examine those aspects of politics, music, architecture, and urbanism essential to the artist’s oeuvre. Let’s hope this landmark show eventually travels Stateside.

— T. J. Demos