MoMA Museum of Modern Art

Cut to Swipe, comprised primarily of recent acquisitions by the Department of Media and Performance Art, features works that appropriate and manipulate images and sound drawn from electronic media like television, cinema, the recording industry, and the Internet. Ranging from Dara Birnbaum’s landmark installation PM Magazine (1982) to recent works by Kevin Beasley, Ken Okiishi, Luther Price, James Richards, Hito Steyerl, and The Otolith Group in collaboration with Chris Marker, the exhibition highlights a range of responses to the quickly changing nature of images, and their proliferation through new imaging and distribution technologies. Carving out a space for personal and political reflection within pervasive streams of information, the works in the exhibition demonstrate the shift from analog to digital concerns, as artists grapple with defining new forms of materiality, and new critical approaches in a radically more virtual world.

Cut to Swipe traces key works, produced since the early 1980s, which have pioneered innovative ways of rearticulating the moving image and appropriated cultural forms within the gallery. If the cut signifies collage and montage, foundational artistic strategies of the 20th century, the swipe suggests a 21st-century condition in which images have moved off the screen, dispersed at the flick of a finger into almost every corner of daily life.

Organized by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, with Erica Papernik, Assistant Curator, and Leora Morinis, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art.