Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025), who passed away last week, spent five decades laying siege to the apparatus of television, rewriting its language from within, and—crucially—holding a mirror up to the coded myths of popular culture. The Marian Goodman Gallery announced her death on Thursday.
A singular figure in the evolution of video and media art, Birnbaum made it her mission to pry open the ideological seams of broadcast media. Her 1978–79 masterwork, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, remains a touchstone for feminist art practice—an electrifying loop that turns television’s gendered spectacle inside out. Her output never waned in its urgency or relevance. Works such as Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (1979), Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992), Arabesque (2011), and the late Journey: Shadow of the American Dream (2022) all interrogate the politics of seeing—and being seen—in an age of mass distraction.
Birnbaum’s work was never about aesthetic pleasure alone; it was a critique laced with visual cunning. She understood television as both seduction and suppression, mining its rhythms and symbols to expose its deeper cultural codes. From the looping snippets of superhero tropes to the austere poetry of her later installations, she consistently returned to questions of identity, control, and narrative architecture.
Her influence was far-reaching, visible in generations of artists who now take image appropriation, deconstruction, and reassembly as givens. Yet few have matched her fluency in both critique and form. Birnbaum exhibited globally at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Fondazione Prada, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. She featured in three iterations of Documenta (7, 8 and 9)—a rare feat underlining her relevance across decades.
Major surveys of her work in recent years—from Vienna’s Belvedere to the Hessel Museum in New York and Prada Aoyama in Tokyo—offered proof that her vision had lost none of its bite. As The New York Times noted in a 2022 review, her early experiments remain “groundbreaking,” with a “wry critique” of media that feels as contemporary as ever.
In an age drowning in images and social media noise, Birnbaum’s work reminds us to look harder—and never to take the screen at face value. Her legacy will endure in institutions and archives and the critical muscle she helped generations of artists build.
Photo: Portrait of Dara Birnbaum at Fondazione Prada. Photo: Francesca D’Amico Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery