Dara Birnbaum (1946), is a pioneering video artist and subject of a pivotal retrospective next month at SMAK in Ghent, Belgium. An architect and urban planner by training, Birnbaum began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79), and TV genres (Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry, 1979) to reveal their subtexts. Birnbaum describes her tapes as new "ready-mades" for the late 20th century—works that "manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative." "I initially avoided galleries like the plague. I didn't want to translate popular imagery from television and film into painting and photography. I wanted to use video on video; I wanted to use television on television." Dara Birnbaum
