Signals: How Video Transformed the World | MoMA
Marta Minujín. Simultaneidad en simultaneidad. 1966. Documents, slides, and ephemera. Dimensions variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised Gift of the Institute for Studies on Latin American (ISLAA), New York. © 2022 Marta Minujín. Image courtesy Marta Minujín Studio and Henrique Faria, New York
Text: Simran Tuteja
Signals: How Video Transformed the World at the Museum of Modern Art in New York primarily focuses on videography. Some artists managed to inculcate different photography techniques as a medium for showcasing their art. This political, artistic, and unique exhibition is quintessential to the progress of humankind. Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, and Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, helped organize the collection and has been on view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions since March 5 and will end on July 8.
Installation view of Signals: How Video Transformed the World, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from March 5 – July 08, 2023. Photo: Robert Gerhardt, Courtesy of the MoMA
A vast silver dome called Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome embellishes Gallery 02. Amongst a plethora of videos and films running simultaneously, 35mm slides and 70mm slides transferred to high definition video, VanDerBeek’s collage-based films that focus on history, anthropology, commerciality, and popular imagery create a contrastive, super-imposing, and perpetually transforming field of information. At the height of Cold War tension, VanDerBeek wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, “The most important concept of this ‘experience machine ' is to make the world audience ‘self’ conscious of itself, which I think is an essential step in the bringing about of peaceful co-existence.” The artist was given a grant for the Movie Drome in 1965 by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Installation view of Signals: How Video Transformed the World, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from March 5 – July 08, 2023. Photo: Robert Gerhardt, Courtesy of the MoMA
Gallery 04 consists of Nil Yalter’s Tower of Babel, for which the Turkish artist living in Paris documented the lives and labor of the Turkish immigrant residing on the outskirts of Paris in the mid-1970s. She revisited her archive in 2016 and digitally scrambled the portraits of women to draw attention to the worsening conditions of immigrant women. Yalter quoted, “Whereverviolence increases, the situation of women worsens, too.” The installation consists of eightchromogenic color prints.
Installation view of Signals: How Video Transformed the World, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from March 5 – July 08, 2023. Photo: Robert Gerhardt, Courtesy of the MoMa
In Gallery 11, the New Red Order, a self-described ‘public secret society,’ make use of photogrammetry to create three-dimensional architectural drawings of the statue End of the Trail (1928), Waupun, Wisconsin, and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939) that was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in 2022. The artists represent both images and cultures using technology. The two monuments can be seen dissolving and collapsing, turning from digital pixels to flesh-like forms. The group stated that they aimed to imagine something through and beyond that can address and promote Indigenous futures. The installation is called Culture Capture: Crimes against Reality(2020).
Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică. Videograms of a Revolution. 1992. 16mm film transferred to standard-definition video (color, sound). 106 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously in honor of Anna Marie Shapiro. © 2022 Harun Farocki Filmproduktion
However political, the three installations uncover the truth of the society using art and promote a better and prosperous future for humanity. Museum of Modern Art’s Signals is one of the most vivid, woke, political and exciting exhibitions that comprise video, art, and public spheres from across the globe. It showcases the transformation of media and how it has affected the world technologically and fundamentally over the past fifty years. The exhibition shows how artists, including Stan VanDerBeek, New Red Order, Nil Yalter, John Akomfrah and Black Audio Film Collective, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Tony Cokes, Chto Delat, Song Dong, Harun Farocki, Amar Kanwar, Dana Kavelina, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Nam June Paik, Tiffany Sia, Martine Syms, Ming Wong, and many more helpful videos and photographs question the society, digital communication, politics, economics, technology, and democracy.
