Martha Rosler. Principles of Politics and Production. 2005 1/7

http://www.egs.edu/ Filmmaker, videographer and artist Martha Rosler, born Brooklyn, New York, lecturing at European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication department studies program. Saas-Fee, Switzerland, 2005

Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and teaches art at Rutgers University and the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport.

Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); as well as many major international survey shows, including the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and several Whitney Biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, "Positions in the Life World" (1998-2000) was shown in five European cities and, concurrently, at the International Center of Photography and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (both in New York).

Among her most widely known works are the pioneering videotapes "Semiotics of the Kitchen" (1974/75), "Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained" (1977), "Losing: A Conversation with the Parents" (1977), and, with Paper Tiger Television, "Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby S/M" (1988). Her photo/text work "The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems" (1974/75) is considered a seminal work in conceptual and postmodern photographic practice. Also widely noted are her series of photomontages, "Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain" (1966-72), addressing the photographic representation of women and domesticity and "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful," addressing the imagery of the Vietnam War (1967-72; reprised in relation to the War in Iraq in 2004).

Many of these works are concerned with the geopolitics of entitlements and dispossession. Her writing and photographic series on roads, the system of air transport, and urban undergrounds (subways or metros) join her other works addressing urban planning and architecture, from housing to homelessness. In 1989, in lieu of a solo exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, Rosler organized the project "If You Lived Here...", in which over 50 artists, film- and video producers, photographers, architects, planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren addressed contested living situations, architecture, planning and utopian visions.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Film
• Video
• Art
• feminism
• Martha
• Rosler
• cinema
• yve-alain
• bois
• EGS
• european
• graduate
• school
• geopolitics
• chile
• coca-cola