martha rosler: crossings

Video Data Bank is proud to present crossings, an extensive collection of video works by Martha Rosler. Spanning five decades, this essential compilation presents Rosler’s unreservedly feminist, politically charged, historically vital, and ever-relevant Super 8 and video artworks. From pivotal early performances such as Semiotics of the Kitchen, to collaborations such as Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $/M, and dissections of war and propaganda such as If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION — this anthology presents the work of one of video art’s most influential artists while simultaneously charting the cultural and technical developments of the video art medium since its inception. Accompanying the works is a newly published monograph detailing Rosler’s video works, with a wide-ranging essay by film and media scholar Nora Alter.

“The subject is the commonplace — I am trying to use video to question the mythical explanations of everyday life. We accept the clash of public and private as natural, yet their separation is historical. The antagonism of the two spheres, which have in fact developed in tandem, is an ideological fiction — a potent one. I want to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and culture under capitalism.”

— Martha Rosler