Catalogue > At random

On Translation projects completed over the last 10 years, is here documented from its inception. Translation is a metaphor, as Muntadas states, “I am not talking about translation in a literal sense, but in a cultural sense–how the world we live in is a totally translated world, everything is always filtered by some social, political, cultural and economic factor… by the media, of course, by context and by history.”

Barcelona-born, but a longtime New Yorker, Antoni Muntadas figures among a first generation of artists investigating the social and political significance of information and broadcast media. This thirty-year retrospective, first seen at the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, includes several videos from the pre’fiber optic era, such as Video Is Television’, 1989, which magnifies and distorts images from a host of appropriated sources, including several Hollywood films (Poltergeist, Network). Backed by a plunking score, the nearly indecipherable TV images are overlaid with captions such as CONTEXT and FRAGMENT: blunt reminders of mass media’s partiality and its constitutive power. An even earlier interactive installation, On Subjectivity, 1978, invites visitors to comment on media images divorced from their original context and therefore’a critical ‘therefore’ for the artist’shorn of their original meaning.