martha rosler: crossings

The first in a pair of silent Super 8 films centering on the backyard of a modest house in a coastal community of north San Diego County. The word “economy” itself was coined in relation to household…

The second in a pair of silent Super 8 films centering on the backyard of a modest house in a coastal community of north San Diego County. The word “economy” itself was coined in relation to…

From A to Z in this mock cooking-show demonstration Rosler 'shows and tells' the ingredients of the housewife's day. She offers an inventory of tools that names and mimics the ordinary with movements…

In 2003, Rosler announced an open call for a live re-staging of her 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, to be held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, for A Short History of Performance, Part II.…

Taking aim at the social standardization enforced particularly on women's bodies, Rosler critiques the politics of "objective" or scientific evaluation that result in the depersonalization,…

The low hills fronting the main California artery of Highway 5 exhibit a beautiful spectrum-like pattern, in stripes formed by the fields of flowers being grown there for commercial sale. The camera…

To the spare sounds of a Schönberg violin concerto, a silhouetted woman seated at a small tea table puts forth her reasons for wanting to become a gourmet. Photographs from glossy cookbooks and…

Rosler uses the format of a cooking demonstration (as in Semiotics of the Kitchen) to address cultural transaction--the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Reading directly from a West Bend…

Treating the problem of anorexia nervosa from the parents' perspective, Rosler presents a mother and father speaking about the tragedy of their daughter's death as a result of dieting. The…

Rosler calls Domination and the Everyday, with its fragmented sounds, images, and crawling text, an artist-mother's This Is Your Life. Throughout this work, we hear—but do not see—a mother and small…

A live performance on a public-access cable program in New York deconstructing the messages in Vogue and its advertising. The work looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the…

Martha Rosler tackles mainstream media's representation of the case of surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead. This video, made with the collective Paper Tiger Television, uncovers the class and gender…

Rosler identifies the totalitarian implications of an argument for torture, under certain circumstances, as it appears as a guest editorial in Newsweek magazine in 1982. Her critique is presented as…

Reading the billboards, the cars, the people, and the graffiti of the street as cultural signs, Rosler extracts the network of social power and domination that determines whose culture gets…

In this silent video, still images of stores and residential buildings in New York City appear within a cutout template, based on the “giftbox heap” formed by the New Museum silhouette. As these…

Shot in Firminy-Vert, a Le Corbusier Unité, or housing project, in south-central France, this work traces the building’s history through an engagement with the lives of its residents and traces of…

In a fusion of text and image, Rosler re-presents the NBC Nightly News and other broadcast reports to analyze their deceptive syntax and capture the confusion intentionally inserted into the news…

A bouncy music-video burlesque shot in and around Santiago, Chile, entwines reminders of U.S. corporate presence and of past political terror, with national and international musical strains. Chile,…

A mechanical toy figure dressed as an American soldier bends and sways, playing God Bless America — the sentimental, unofficial, and highly favored national anthem during World War II — on a bugle.…

A visualization of phrases used by Prime Minister David Cameron during his Oxfordshire speech addressing the events of August 2011. Selected phrases emerge from the stream of his speech, punctuated…

Martha Rosler (b.1943) received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1974. Rosler has produced seminal works in the fields of photography,…