Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, photomontages (1967-72) Semiotics of the Kitchen, video (1975) The East is red and the West in Bending, video (1977) Vital statistics of the citizen, simply obtained (1977) If it’s too bad to be true, it would be disinformation, video, (1985) A simple case of torture, video (1983).

Having produced work in photography, photomontage, sculpture, video, performance and installation, Martha Rosler has consistently challenged the romantic idea that artists need to focus on one particular medium. In her writing about art and social theory, and in her critical discussion of the ideologies that shape our culture and our social interactions, Rosler is an important influence on generations of younger artists. Active in the women's and civil rights movements in the U.S., her social engagement led her to develop a method where collaboration is emphasized over individual expression. Rosler describes her work as a series of open questions. She prefers transformation over consistency, and resists conventional modes of art distribution by inventing unusual settings for her work.

The Liberation Chapter presents an opportunity for the Vietnamese audience to see a wide ion of Martha Rosler’s work from the late 1960’s to mid-1980’s for the first time. The photomontage series, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful was started in direct response to Rosler’s concern with America’s continuation of the Vietnam War and her experience of the media broadcast of death and destruction into the American home. The series brings together photojournalistic images of victims and soldiers with pictures from interior decoration magazines. The contrast between a nation in an imperialist war and an oblivious American suburbia is an astringent comment to the general alienation felt by many Americans about their country’s role in the conflict. The media depiction of warfare is an ongoing concern in Rosler’s work. She developed this first montage-series until 1972, and in 2004 started a second series in reaction to the War in Iraq.

Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain is another photomontage series from 1978 that addresses the photographic representation of women and domesticity. Women’s experience in society is one of Martha Rosler’s recurrent themes, and the series parodies how women are reduced to mere body parts by the advertisement industry. Among Rosler’s videos to be shown in the Liberation Chapter is the pioneering work Semiotics of the kitchen, itself a milestone in feminist art. It takes the form of a parodic cooking program. Rosler introduces the ingredients of the housewife's day from A to Z. She picks a range of domestic tools from a kitchen counter and with them demonstrates the rage and frustration felt by women confined by the home.
(CNG)