Diana Thater

“Diana Thater. Keep the Faith” is the title of the exhibition with which the Museum of Contemporary Art in Siegen and the Kunsthalle Bremen are presenting, for the first time in Europe, a comprehensive retrospective of the work of American video artist Diana Thater (b. 1962 in San Francisco; lives and works in Los Angeles).

Both exhibitions are designed to complement each other in every respect, with a visit to one institution naturally leading to a visit to the other. In Bremen, the focus is on her more recent works since 1998, while the Siegen museum is dedicated to her seminal early works created between 1993 and 1997. The Siegen presentation offers, for the first time, an insight into the artist’s early work, in which she explores the complex intermedia field of “video” through allusions to feature films, 1960s experimental film, the beginnings of video art, and literature.

Diana Thater developed the Siegen portion of the exhibition so that the large-scale installations are distributed throughout the building. This gives visitors the opportunity to discover the artist’s video works within the context of the rest of the exhibition. Diana Thater, in turn, conceived the entire route through the Bremen exhibition as a journey through the color spectrum of the electronic image: Visitors move from one color space to the next, from yellow through green, blue, magenta, red, cyan, and back to yellow. “Diana Thater. Keep the faith” continues the series of video exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bremen featuring “old masters” (Paik 1999, Campus 2003) and younger artists (Melhus 2002). In Siegen, the exhibition represents a central focus of the museum, which, through its activities, directs attention toward intermedia and the interaction between old and new media, because Diana Thater makes the intermedia potential of the video medium the foundation of her work. A catalog accompanies the exhibition.

Curators 
Barbara Engelbach, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen
Wulf Herzogenrath, Kunsthalle Bremen