Martha Rosler will focus on projects that demonstrate the relationships between her pedagogical, ideological, and formal methodologies. She will discuss in detail her work centered on militarization and home life, on literacy, on housing, homelessness and gentrification, and on photographic representation—discourses in which she has had significant influence.
Martha Rosler’s work focuses on the public sphere and landscapes of everyday life, especially as they affect women. Working with photography, video, text, installation, and performance, she aims to engage people as citizens by investigating and challenging power disparities that are normalized through images and discourses. Reaching broader sections of the public, critiquing restrictive language, and replacing spectatorship with greater participation are all central issues in her work, while her social research and writing dovetails with these concerns regarding the question of audience.
Rosler’s work has been exhibited extensively. Her photographic and text work, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974–1975), is considered a milestone in the examination of documentary practices in art and photography. The Martha Rosler Library, containing over 7,500 books from Rosler’s collection, toured nationally and internationally between 2005 and 2009. Her collected writings, Decoys and Disruptions (2004), was published by October Books and MIT Press in 2004, and her most recent volume, Culture Class, centering on artists and gentrification, was published by e-flux and Sternberg Press in 2013. Rosler’s writing has been distributed widely in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She has upcoming solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in New York and at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and a two-person exhibition with Hito Steyerl at the Kunstmuseum, Basel.
