“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 contrasted excerpts from the inaugural speech of the 41st US President George Bush with the anti-​militaristic poem “Hum Bom” by Allen Ginsberg: 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 context 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.