Stan VanDerBeek Archive

Offering a timely examination of video, art, and the public sphere, The Museum of Modern Art will present Signals: How Video Transformed the World, a major exhibition that will be on view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions from March 5 through July 8, 2023. Through a diverse range of more than 70 works, drawn primarily from MoMA’s collection, Signals examines the ways in which artists have both championed and questioned video as an agent of social change—from televised revolution to electronic democracy. The presentation positions video not as a traditional medium but as a transformational media network, one that has fundamentally altered the world.

Signals will investigate the ways in which artists such as John Akomfrah and Black Audio Film Collective, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Tony Cokes, Chto Delat, Song Dong, Harun Farocki, Amar Kanwar, Dana Kavelina, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, New Red Order, Nam June Paik, Tiffany Sia, Martine Syms, Ming Wong, Nil Yalter, and many others have used video over the past five decades to pose urgent questions about the singular impact that electronic media have had on participatory democracy, identity politics, economic access, and technological power. Collectively, the works and artists in the exhibition confront the ways in which the physical world has merged with the virtual, and reveal a history that is global, critical, and activist from its very beginnings.

Signals: How Video Transformed the World, organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, and Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, and Lina Kavaliunas, Curatorial Assistant, Piper Marshall, Exhibition Coordinator, Eana Kim, Marica and Jan Vilcek Fellow, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Mellon-Marron Museum Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, is on view at MoMA March 5–July 8, 2023.