“TV is a real role maker.” (Dara Birnbaum)

The American video and installation artist Dara Birnbaum (1946-2025) has died at the age of 78. With her media and socially critical work, the three-time documenta participant was one of the most important pioneers of video art from the mid-1970s onwards. Trained as an architect and urban planner, she used her video tapes and increasingly expansive installations to question the manipulative power of television and the gender stereotypes spread by the media.

One of her earliest and best-known works is the 6-minute video clip “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1979), which Birnbaum constructed entirely from broadcast material from the TV series of the same name. In a “confined space”, minimal scraps of action and the identity changes of the title heroine are condensed into a continuous chain of climaxes: The methodical fragmentation of the image and sound material, which is played in loops, reveals the clichéd staging of female role models in just a few minutes.

Dara Birnbaum was invited to documenta three times in a row: both the artistic director of documenta 7, Rudi Fuchs, and his direct successors, Manfred Schneckenburger and Jan Hoet, invited her to participate in Kassel. She staged her video-based spatial installations in direct confrontation with the architectural situation in the Museum Fridericianum.

At documenta 7 (1982), she showed the multi-channel installation “PM Magazine” as a walk-in video environment. Five years later, as part of documenta 8 (1987), she presented her three-part long-term project “The Damnation of Faust” to the public. Finally, as a contribution to documenta 9 (1992), she conceived the commissioned work “Transmission Tower: Sentinel”, which combines excerpts from the inaugural speech of the 41st US President George Bush with the words of his speech. With reference to the French speed theorist Paul Virilio, whose work “War and Cinema” Birnbaum quotes in her multi-page “Project Proposal” (documenta archiv, AA, d09, 141), the work criticizes the ideological mechanisms of media broadcast images in the mirror of the Second Gulf War.

Dara Birnbaum taught as a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York and held teaching positions at numerous universities, such as the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main (1992-1993), Princeton University and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.