Signals: How Video Transformed the World
Video is everywhere today鈥攐n our phones and screens, defining new spaces and experiences, spreading memes, lies, fervor, and power. Shared, sent, and networked, it shapes public opinion and creates new publics. In other words, video has transformed the world. Bringing together a diverse range of work from the past six decades, Signals reveals the ways in which artists have posed video as an agent of global change鈥攆rom televised revolution to electronic democracy.
The exhibition highlights over 70 media works, drawn primarily from MoMA鈥檚 collection, with many never before seen at the Museum. Featured artists include John Akomfrah, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Tony Cokes, Amar Kanwar, New Red Order, Nam June Paik, Sondra Perry, Martine Syms, Stan VanDerBeek, and Ming Wong. Signals enables audiences to experience video art鈥檚 wildly varied formats, settings, and global reach, from closed-circuit surveillance to viral video, from large-scale installation to social networks.
With this broad range of forms and media, artists have championed and questioned the promise of video. Some have hoped to create entirely new networks of communication, democratic engagement, and public participation. Others have protested the rise of commercial and state control over information, vision, and truth itself. Signals focuses on the ways in which artists have used video to ask urgent questions about society and propose new models of public life.
Recommended for you
Video is everywhere today鈥攐n our phones and screens, defining new spaces and experiences, spreading memes, lies, fervor, and power. Shared, sent, and networked, it shapes public opinion and creates new publics. In other words, video has transformed the world. Bringing together a diverse range of work from the past six decades, Signals reveals the ways in which artists have posed video as an agent of global change鈥攆rom televised revolution to electronic democracy.
The exhibition highlights over 70 media works, drawn primarily from MoMA鈥檚 collection, with many never before seen at the Museum. Featured artists include John Akomfrah, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Tony Cokes, Amar Kanwar, New Red Order, Nam June Paik, Sondra Perry, Martine Syms, Stan VanDerBeek, and Ming Wong. Signals enables audiences to experience video art鈥檚 wildly varied formats, settings, and global reach, from closed-circuit surveillance to viral video, from large-scale installation to social networks.
With this broad range of forms and media, artists have championed and questioned the promise of video. Some have hoped to create entirely new networks of communication, democratic engagement, and public participation. Others have protested the rise of commercial and state control over information, vision, and truth itself. Signals focuses on the ways in which artists have used video to ask urgent questions about society and propose new models of public life.
Contact details
Related articles
In a new Moma exhibition spanning six decades, pioneering artists are remembered and celebrated for how they tried to use video as a tool for social change
Offering a timely examination of video, art, and the public sphere, The Museum of Modern Art is presenting Signals: How Video Transformed the World, a major exhibition that is on view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions from March 5 through July 8...
The Museum of Modern Art presents Signals, through Jul 8.
鈥淰ideo is everywhere,鈥� begins the wall text at the entrance to MoMA鈥檚 largest video show in decades, as if on a cautionary note.
What's on nearby
