About

Dara Birnbaum (New York, 1946) is an American artist who has stood out since the 1970s with her video works. At that time, television had a huge influence in people's lives, it was the main and most influential source of information in society, now amplified by the internet. Birnbaum critically analyses the television universe, frequently using TV broadcast images, by interrupting them, repeating them and editing them. From the 1990s onwards, she began to create large-scale video installations, consisting of several television screens.

Specially commissioned for Documenta IX in Kassel, Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992) analyses the influence of television on American politics, in this case regarding the First Gulf War, which began in 1991. Eight video monitors, mounted on sections of a transmission tower, form a line that follows the trajectory of a bomb dropped from a cargo plane. Images of George Bush addressing the 1988 National Republican Congress are broadcast on each monitor. At the same time, images of poet Allen Ginsberg reading his anti-war poem Hum Bom!, written during the Vietnam War and rewritten for the Golf War, at a 1988 National Student Convention, stream across the monitor pole.

Gallery

Location

Location

The Serralves Museum

Museums & Thematic Centres