Launch of e-flux Index #8 with Piper Marshall and a tribute to Dara Birnbau

Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, February 10 at 7pm for the launch of , featuring Piper Marshall and a tribute to Dara Birnbaum. Marshall will read from her remembrance of Dara Birnbaum, published in e-flux Notes on the occasion of Birnbaum's passing and re-published in e-flux Index #8. The reading will be followed by a screening of selected works from Birnbaum's seminal oeuvre. Copies of e-flux Index #8will be available for purchase at a discounted price at the event.

Index #8 explores the fragmentary complexity of the current moment through pointing out eleven emergent themes drawn from texts commissioned by e-flux throughout the spring of 2025. These indications for reading refuse the xenophobic illogic of the us/them, friend/enemy strategies of categorizing, and instead seek to index multiple temporalities and positions simultaneously—in a non-linear way. They bring together exhibition and film reviews, in-depth theoretical and historical essays on contemporary art, architecture, and design, interviews with artists, theorists, and filmmakers, journeys into the archive of film history, and shorter missives on sociopolitics and contemporary culture.

The printed edition of the Index is available to purchase online and from select art and design bookstores, as well as museums, throughout Canada, East Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. The publication is distributed by Antenne Books(Europe and the UK), Les presses du réel (Europe), Asterism Books (USA), Art Metropole(Canada), The Book Society (East Asia), and Buchhandlung Walther König (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Annual subscriptions, covering four issues, are available at both institutional and individual rates here.

Screening Program

Dara Birnbaum, Liberty: A Dozen or So Views (1976, 11 minutes)
Filmed on the Staten Island Ferry, this early video moves between repeated views of the Statue of Liberty and interviews with fellow passengers, structured through a set of classificatory questions that echo the bureaucratic logics of registration and arrival. By having interviewees take the camera and record their own vantage on the statue, the work folds physical description, point of view, and the idea of “liberty” into a single, unsettled observational frame.

Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79, 6 minutes)
Appropriating footage from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of transformation, using fragmentation and looping to expose the ideology embedded in televisual form and pop iconography. The stuttering edits turn the heroine’s “spin” into a mechanism, pushing pleasure and cliché toward critique, and making the codes of representation visible as code.

Dara Birnbaum, Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry (1979, 7 minutes)
Using off-air imagery from Hollywood Squares, Birnbaum extracts and repeats banal, exaggerated gestures of self-presentation, dislodging them from their broadcast context to foreground power, gendered performance, and the theatricality of television address. On-screen text and a deliberately constructed soundtrack sharpen the work’s analysis of how mass-cultural idioms choreograph “looking” and being looked at.

Dara Birnbaum, PM Magazine/Acid Rock (1982, 4 minutes)
A delirious collage of appropriated TV intros, commercial fragments, and recomposed pop music, PM Magazine/Acid Rock accelerates, slows, reframes, and colorizes icons of leisure, consumption, and desire until their promise curdles into a critique of television’s dreamwork. Produced in relation to a larger installation context, the piece condenses broadcast spectacle into a compact, high-pressure montage.

Dara Birnbaum, Fire!/Hendrix (1982, 3 minutes)
Commissioned for a Hendrix videodisc, Fire!/Hendrix adopts the pacing and stylization of a music video while turning that language against itself. A fragmented narrative and a chain of consumer images stage a critique of sexuality and commodification, with the protagonist positioned simultaneously as viewer and object within the advertising image.

Dara Birnbaum, Damnation of Faust Trilogy (1983–87, 22 minutes)
Across three linked parts, Birnbaum reworks the Faust myth into a shifting field of dreamlike introspection and mediated memory. Beginning with a street-level prologue, moving through a voiced reverie of loss and betrayal, and ending in a turn toward collective history, the trilogy tracks how subjectivity is shaped by technology, images, and the collision of personal and public narrative.

For more information, please contact [email protected].

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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