Martha Rosler: la casa, la calle, la cocina (The House, the Street, the Kitchen)

This retrospective exhibition of Martha Rosler’s activist art from the late 1960s to the early 1990s and its related publication not only contribute to “archiving the Left”, but also to the art world’s appropriation of subversive opposition. For many leftist artists this is an inevitable paradox. Some of them respond by “double coding”, whereby one version of their past work, which had critically engaged audiences and communities outside of the art world system, is now presented as a second version in the context of major retrospectives and publications. The latter, artists hope, constitutes activism from within the system.