DARA BIRNBAUM AND UTE META BAUER

A conversation with artist Dara Birnbaum and Ute Meta Bauer, Associate Professor and Director, Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, MIT.

With the exponential growth of contemporary art museums, what new demands are being placed upon artists? Have women artists benefited from this proliferation? Given that time-based media has been present in the museum for over forty years, how have these works changed museums, and the way audiences use them?

Dara Birnbaum is an artist who lives and works in New York. A retrospective exhibition of her work was organized by S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium in 2009 and then traveled to Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal in 2010. In conjunction with the retrospective, a major monograph on Birnbaum’s work, The Dark Matter of Media Light, was published. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; MACBA, Barcelona; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, amongst others. This year, Birnbaum was awarded a Creative Artist Residency at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Ute Meta Bauer is Founding Director of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore. Bauer is also Professor of Art at NTU’s School of Art, Media, and Design. She was previously Associate Professor and the Director of the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, where she had served as Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program from 2005-09. From 1996-2006, Bauer held an appointment at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as a professor of theory and practice of contemporary art. Educated as an artist for more than two decades Bauer has worked as a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. She was a co-curator of Documenta 11 (2001/2002) in the team of Okwui Enwezor, has been the artistic director of the 3rd Berlin Biennial (2004) and in 2005 curated the Mobile_Transborder Archive for InSite05, Tijuana /San Diego.

“The Now Museum: Contemporary Art, Curating Histories, Alternative Models” was presented by the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, Independent Curators International, and the New Museum on March 10, 2011 – March 13, 2011.

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