Dara Birnbaum, Amar Kanwar, and Daniel Boyd | 12 January 2024

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DARA BIRNBAUM
Four Works: Accountability

12 JANUARY 24 FEBRUARY 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY 12 JANUARY, 6-8 PM

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of Dara Birnbaum, which centers around works from the 1990s that engage directly with political events, exploring legacies of dissent, and investigating the codes and gestures through which politics is lived. Spanning varied media, the works include a multi-channel installation, single-channel video, archival pigment prints, and UV prints on Duratrans. The exhibition takes up Birnbaum’s longstanding interest in historical memory, public address, and the transmutability of images.

Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992), first commissioned by documenta IX, and conceived in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War, uses the armature of telecommunication (the Rohn transmission tower) and juxtaposes three forms of political speech. Deploying two sections of a Rohn tower as the floor-to-ceiling scaffold for eight video monitors, through which images and sound juxtapose and rub against each other, the installation lays bare the deep imbrication of media and the military, entertainment and politics, visibility and the possibilities of protest.

The Rohn small television tower, invented in Peoria, Illinois in 1948, became the keystone of broadcasting infrastructure across the United States and a ubiquitous presence in military telecommunications worldwide. Like the steel lines forming the tower, the formulated video wall operates via verticals. Falling from one screen to the next is Birnbaum’s recording of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reading his anti-war poem “Hum Bom!” at the 1988 National Student Convention. Simultaneously, her footage of other scenes of student participants from this convention rise up the tower. The passion, idiosyncrasy, and relative chaos of these representations are in stark contrast to the tightly polished, controlled messaging of other video footage, in which President George H. W. Bush delivers his “Thousand Points of Light” speech at the Republican National Convention of the same year. A green wave pattern visually represents the measured rise and fall of his voice as the video drips downward from screen to screen.

Antenna/Fist (1992), is a series of seventeen prints which appropriate imagery from street posters made in the fervency of May 1968 in France, when student revolution planted the seeds for a state-wide general strike. Collectively produced and widely dispersed, the street displayed posters were created by a collective of artists based at the occupied École des Beaux-Arts. With their iconography – the raised fist of the revolutionary, the blocky silhouette of a spiked antenna – they are an expression of the counterculture of the period, and carry the ferment of idealism, rebellion, and rejection of the status quo that permeated French society and marked the second half of the 20th century.

These messages of protest are juxtaposted with the single-channel video Canon: Taking to the Streets, (1990). Composed of archival footage of the 1987 Take Back the Night demonstration at Princeton University, the work abstractly depicts the march through the campus to sites where acts of sexual violence occurred. Shot by students with a low-grade VHS camera, the work simultaneously portrays the highly personal and emotive accounts of assault with an encounter with males from fraternity-type houses jeering at the demonstrators.

The pathos of popular imagery is crystallized in Quiet Disaster (1999), a trio of circular Duratrans prints on Plexiglas panels. Birnbaum utilized three specifically cropped and enlarged anime drawings portraying the reactions of characters in danger that emphasize a look of fear. To create these works, Birnbaum examined elemental disasters portrayed through comic and anime from different countries and cultures, showcasing this universal gesture within individual expression.

Dara Birnbaum was born in New York City, in 1946, where she continues to live and work. She received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, a B.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Certificate in Video and Electronic Editing at the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research, New York. Birnbaum's work has been widely exhibited, at venues including: Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2023), the Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan (2023); Prada Aoyama, Tokyo (2023); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023; also 2008), MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018), among many others.

Major retrospectives and surveys of her work have been presented at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2022); Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh (2022); Museu de Arte Contemporånea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium (2009). Her work was exhibited in Documenta 7, 8, and 9.

Birnbaum has been the recipient of various distinguished awards, such as: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011); and the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship (2010). She is the first woman in video to receive the prestigious Maya Deren Award by the American Film Institute, in 1987. In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art created The Birnbaum Award in the artist's honor.

AMAR KANWAR
The Peacock's Graveyard

12 JANUARY 24 FEBRUARY 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY 12 JANUARY, 6-8 PM

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Amar Kanwar’s most recent work The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023). Originally commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 15, the multi-channel installation weaves together images and sounds that meditate on the transience of existence.

Comprised of a set of projections onto seven screens, the lyrical images in The Peacock’s Graveyard emerge and recede individually and then simultaneously, leading us on an abstract journey. Forming a visual haiku across distinct channels in the exhibition space, these images are overlaid with texts; stories written by Kanwar, that draw upon received narratives and oral histories, blending ancient and modern folklore traditions with personal experience.

Offering a unique vantage point through which to consider collective and individual truths, Kanwar here employs a variety of editing and staging methods which invite viewers to reflect on non-canonical wisdom. In this way, The Peacock’s Graveyard departs from earlier documentary strategies within his work, articulating the need for a metaphysical re-organization of thought from which it is possible to glimpse another world. Kanwar’s work has always operated with the premise that rationality and power cannot and do not exhaust the possibilities of life. Remaining critically engaged with the array of forces on individual lives, the work presents a suite of parables which more obliquely take up questions of responsibility and ethos, dignity and loss. 

Of the work, the artist writes that it is “[…] not a lament or mourning, but perhaps a kind of gift, a collection of stories, some ancient, some new, something to keep by one’s side every day, or take along if going someplace, or to help us reconfigure life, ideologies, politics, solidarities, social movements. These stories lay the groundwork for reflecting on our unbearable arrogance, delusions and deep desire for violence. ’

Kanwar’s poetic films and video installations have explored the political, social, economic and ecological conditions of our times, often focusing on the Indian subcontinent. His work traces the legacy of globalization and decolonization, land use and border rights, environmental concerns, human rights and free expression; and sexual violence. Interwoven throughout these inquiries are disparate narrative structures which ground his philosophical investigations. Through hybrid installations which incorporate images, literature, poetry and music, Kanwar creates meditative works that do not aim to represent trauma, so much as to find ways through them. How does a landscape comprise beauty and violence; how does poetry stand in for evidence; how do visions within darkness engender light and new pedagogies? Kanwar's work looks deeply into the causes and effects, and of how they are translated into everyday life and cultural forms. 

Amar Kanwar was born in 1964 in New Delhi, India, where he currently lives and works.

Recent solo exhibitions of Kanwar’s work have been held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2022); Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE and NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, UAE (2020), Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2019), Tate Modern, London; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, USA and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, USA (2018), Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden and Frac Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France (2017), Goethe Institut, Mumbai (2016) and at the Assam State Museum in collaboration with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and North East Network, India (2015). Earlier solo exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2013), the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2012), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007), National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (2006), and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2004). 

Kanwar has participated in Documenta 11, 12, 13 and 14 in Kassel, Germany (2002, 2007, 2012, 2017) as well as in the Kochi-Muziris Biennial, India (2013, 2022). In 2023 Kanwar participated in Signals: How video transformed the World at the Museum of Modern Art, USA and at the Sharjah Biennial 15, United Arab Emirates.    

Amar Kanwar has been the recipient of several awards including an Honorable Mention at the Sharjah Biennial 2023, the IHME Helsinki Commission (2022); Prince Claus Award (2017); Creative Time’s Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change (2014); an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, Maine College of Art, USA (2006); the Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art, Norway (2005); the Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, USA (1999), as well as the Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival, India (1998).

DANIEL BOYD
Dreamland

12 JANUARY 24 FEBRUARY 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY 12 JANUARY, 6-8 PM

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of Daniel Boyd, Dreamland.

One of Australia’s most highly regarded artists and the 2014 winner of the prestigious Bulgari Art Prize, Daniel Boyd has been showing in Australia and internationally since 2005. He has participated in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), as curated by Okwui Enwezor, and the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016), and was the subject of a 2022 retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His exhibition RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION), a joint project with Gropius Bau, Berlin and IMA, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane where it is currently on view, runs through December 16th, 2023.

With his complex and divergent works spanning an array of historical references from landscape and Western-style portraiture to the traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Boyd seeks to negotiate the identity of art, history and cultural survival through his investigations of oppressed and colonial culture. His questioning of what is defined as history blends seamlessly into the confluence of his work, where he brings to the forefront the often overlooked and discarded history of his Aboriginal ancestors. “We have the oldest continuous culture on earth and it's important to celebrate that,” said Boyd.

In the paintings on view, Boyd punctuates the canvas with dots or ‘lenses’ with a mixture of black paint and archival glue. Unlike Aboriginal dot painting, which was traditionally created with sand, or on the body, as a form of storytelling, his mark-making is reflective of the Gestalt theory of perception. The mind interprets an organized whole through the multitude of lenses, a form of gestalt, as a means to perceive the work; additionally, the profusion of dots represents the collective viewpoint. These acts of intervention through a ‘lens’ that both inscribes and erases its subject, are informed as well by the allegory of Plato’s Cave (the metaphorical realm between reality and interpretation), and the search for dark matter, where the unseen and the in-between carry meaning.

Within the subject matter of his work, Boyd brings attention to, and reveals his rejection of, Western traditions as canon and conveys his desire to revise the way history is taught. By imprinting dots that ultimately obfuscate the illustrated subject, Boyd creates a connection to “blackness, porosity and history,” as noted by Asad Raza.

Boyd’s explorations of Western civilization focus on cultural objects, the longing for landscape, and portraits that are both historic and personal. Revisiting and revising the perspective of who is notable- he questions the motivations and desires to elevate specific aesthetic forms, challenging what is defined as archetypal, and examining received hierarchies on beauty and race. In questioning social structures, he addresses who is given representation in the arts. In his paintings, he depicts Apollo Belvedere, a Greek god of harmony, beauty, and perfection, and Elizabeth Taylor, who played the Egyptian queen Cleopatra in the 1963 film of the same name.

First Nation culture is imbued in works that carry both biographical and historical significance for Boyd; in Untitled (GB17), he depicts his maternal grandmother at a mission wedding, which is in part a loving tribute as well as a reminder of the many ways that colonialists controlled indigenous Australians. Similarly, paintings of a sunset near his grandmother’s home, Untitled (TALTIHHASFATS); or one showing Aboriginal men obscured in the rainforest, Untitled (IFITFOMADFSP), as well as the silhouette of a younger Aboriginal person Untitled (HBOAIAZ), offer evidence of the dream of a homeland. A boomerang sits above a horizon line, in Untitled (AIAFNSCAI), conveying cultural appropriation of the object; Untitled (IKTWMICAHFT) features a ceremonial figure collected by Matisse, underscoring the assimilation of indigenous history in modernism’s past.

The dot paintings have a textured quality about them, a three-dimensional feel which changes with how and where it is presented with the use of angle and light. The surface of the painting almost feels as if it can be activated. The employing of optical and translucent convex lenses within his work conversely exposes what the viewer cannot see, serving as a reflection of history as dispersed extracts, distorted and revised. Boyd says, “I wanted them to be alive. I wanted a kind of movement in them, and a continuum through activation, so that audience activates them. It gives them the opportunity to grow and gather association so it's not on the surface, it's a convex. The light catches as you move coming in front of it.”

Daniel Boyd was born in 1982 in Cairns, now a resident of Sydney, Boyd studied art at the Australian National University’s School of Art & Design in Canberra. His heritage spans several tribes including Kudjala, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Bundjalung, Yuggera and ni-Vanuatu.

Past solo exhibitions include Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island, his 2022 exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, several solo presentations, including his first at Mori Gallery and Roslyn Oxley Gallery; he participated at Melbourne Arts Festival in 2010. Okwui Enwezor selected Boyd to take part in the Venice Biennale in 2015; in the same year, he was the winner of the inaugural Young Artist Award, as given by the Melbourne Art Foundation Awards for the Visual Arts. Boyd joined seven of his fellow art practitioners in a new artist-in-residence trial on Cockatoo Island, Sydney, in 2009. In 2008, the Queensland Art Gallery’s Gallery of Modern Art included his work in Contemporary Australia: Optimism.