Martha Rosler is an artist working in video, photo-text, installation, and performance. She also writes criticism and lectures nationally and internationally. Her work on the public sphere ranges from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially housing. Her work often centers on women’s experience. Rosler has long produced works on war and the “national security climate” that predisposes to war. Her photomontage series joining images of war and domesticity, first made in relation to the war in Vietnam, has been reprised in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan. Her works on systems of travel and their associated environments, including air travel, automobile travel and urban undergrounds, further consider the landscapes of everyday life.
In 2007, Rosler participated in the documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster exhibitions; her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in many other venues. A retrospective of her work was shown, in1999-2001, in five European cities and in two New York museums. In 2005, Rosler received the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, and a partial retrospective was held at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, in conjunction with this award. In 2006, Rosler received the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize, Austria’s highest fine arts award. In 2007, she received an Anonymous Was a Woman award. In 2008, she was honored by The Center for Book Arts in New York City. Rosler has published fourteen books, in several languages, and numerous essays. A book of her essays, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001, was published by MIT in 2004. She Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.