Martha Rosler

Known for DirectingBorn 1943-07-29 (age 82)Brooklyn, New York, USA

Martha Rosler (born 1943) is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, site-specific and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport. Since the early 1970s, Martha Rosler has used photography, performance, writing, and video to deconstruct cultural reality. Describing her work, Rosler says, “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.” Avoiding a pedantic stance, Rosler characteristically lays out visual and verbal material in a manner that allows the contradictions to gradually emerge, so that the audience can discern these disjunctions for themselves. By making her ideas accessible, Rosler invites her audience to re-examine the dynamics and demands of ideology, urging critical consciousness of the individual compromises exacted by society, and opening the door to a radical re-thinking of how cultural “reality” is constructed for the economic and political benefit of a select group.Read more

Movies & web series

Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained

Semiotics of the Kitchen

If it's too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION

Museums will eat your lunch

Because This Is Britain

Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition

Prototype (God Bless America)

Chile on the Road to NAFTA, Accompanied by the National Police Band

Seattle: Hidden Histories

How Do We Know What Home Looks Like? The Unité d’Habitation of Le Corbusier at Firminy, France

Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $/M

Martha Rosler: An Interview

A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night

Martha Rosler Reads "Vogue"

Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure

Domination and the Everyday

Losing: A Conversation with the Parents

The East Is Red, The West Is Bending

A Budding Gourmet

Backyard Economy 2 (Diane Germain Mowing)

Flower Fields

Backyard Economy 1

Reading the Media

Pencicle of Praise