MILAN.- An extensive survey exhibition dedicated to American artist Dara Birnbaum opened to the public on 13 April 2023. It is on view at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan until 25 September 2023. A parallel exhibition will be presented at Prada Aoyama Tokyo from 1 June to 28 August 2023.

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” 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. The project 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. It illustrates the wide range of media and artistic languages employed in her practice and explores the recurrent topics of her ongoing creative work.

Her pioneering video, media, and installation work has addressed the ideological and aesthetic character of mass media imagery over the past four decades. 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 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.