Fondazione Prada opens a new exhibition at its Observatory on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.This is an exhibition that follows the line of experimentation in the field of visual languages, focusing on one of the pioneering artists in the field, Dara Birnbaum.
The artist was born in New York in 1946, at the dawn of the post-war period that would become an important theme in her artistic production, which challenges the canons of art and mass media, with works created in a wide variety of formats, from video to audio, as well as photos and 3D prints, all techniques that are part of the selection of works in this latest Milan exhibition, open until September 25, 2023.
To discover Dara Birnbaum is to discover pioneering work on video and installation that critically references the aesthetics of media imagery. The manipulation of the television image has been avant-garde in the contemporary art world for years, thanks to the ability to integrate three-dimensionality and video into large audiovisual projects.

Works made from 1975 to 2022 and exhibited in Milan help explain the path of a creative who through the products of television culture has enriched the critical dialogue of more than half a century. Being born in the post-World War II period for example led Birnbaum to question how the American dream and the propagandistic enthusiasm of victory cast shadows on an entire generation. Indeed, references to those years are present in the artist’s works, resorting to a childhood and family memory that completes a harsh critique of American society.
The representation of icons and their appearance in the common imagination are central themes in understanding Dara’s work. To accomplish this critical process, the artist draws on popular icons from television, such as Wonder Woman, an example for Birnbaum of how the mass media can create trivial icons and heroes by associating them with important social battles such as feminism.

It is precisely the feminist gaze that is at the center of so many installations, aimed at representing the conflict and social containment of identity struggles for which entire generations have fought, belittling the strength of concepts precisely through a sterile representation of images.
The works exhibited at the Observatory follow this conceptual line, also further deepening the separation between the body and its representation, which in the artist’s visual language is enacted through the repetitive and twisted actions of the camera. The body for Dara Birnbaum ends up constantly and daily in the mass-media meat grinder, in an economy that sexualizes it according to logics dictated by consumerism. To these dynamics the artist over the course of her career has responded through the reproduction of provocative images, which have brought her into contact with the main countercultural movements of recent decades, also explored in depth in the exhibition presented by Fondazione Prada.