Tribute to Dara Birnbaum by Piper Marshall—e-flux Index #8 launch

This episode was recorded live at e-flux on February 10, 2026, celebrating the launch of e-flux Index #8. The recording features Piper Marshall reading from her remembrance of Dara Birnbaum.

Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025) was a pioneering American video and installation artist whose various critiques and transformations of the moving image have inspired artists internationally. An architect and painter by training, Birnbaum entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television's ever-growing presence within the American household. Her work primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media, involving the re-manipulation of television's idiomatic grammar and enacting a complex and critical engagement with the medium's representation of political events and the public's reception of history.

Piper Marshall is an art historian, curator, and critic whose practice combines rigorous research with exhibition-making. She leads innovative, interdisciplinary work on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art and technology. She has served on curatorial teams for Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning (2024) and Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Additional exhibitions and collaborations include: Media and Mind Control (2025); Growing Sideways: Artists Performing Childhood (2024); Laurie Simmons: Clothes Make the Man (2018); Nina Chanel Abney: Safe House (2017); Judith Barry: Imagination Dead Imagine (2017); Silke Otto Knapp: Monotones (2017); Fia Backstrom: Woe Men Keep Going (2017); Sinister Feminism (2017); Judith Bernstein: Voyeur (2015); Ericka Beckman: You The Better (2015). She has written and lectured widely, contributing numerous essays and articles on the work of Joan Jonas, Dara Birnbaum, Eric N. Mack, Ed Atkins, and Carolyn Lazard. She has taught at Columbia and Wesleyan Universities. From 2014–2018, she served as an independent curator at Mary Boone Gallery. From 2007–2013, she was a curator at Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York. Marshall earned her PhD in the history of art and architecture from Columbia University and her BA from Barnard College.

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.