Michael Blum

Michael Blum (born 1966 in Jerusalem) is an artist using a variety of media, ranging from photography and video to books, installations, objects, text, printed matter. He studied history at Paris University, photography at Ecole Nationale de la Photographie, Arles, France, and later spent 2 years at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He's been developing works that aim at critically re-reading the production of culture and history. His work has been shown at numerous venues including the Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), the New Museum (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), Kunsthalle Vienna, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Baltic, Istanbul, Torino and Tirana Biennials. The 1990s Initially and under influence of the OuLiPo, his interest focused on language and classification systems : Choses à récupérer chez Milena à l’exception des meubles, de l’aspirateur et des rideaux, qui seront repris lors d’un déménagement ultérieur (1992), Blum's first video, is an exhaustion of all possible relations between word and object, after a found list of objects written by an unknown manic person. C’est la vie (1996), a series of poetic obituaries based on French fin-de-siecle journalist and anarchist Felix Feneon, and recorded on almost extinct Super-8 stock, is both hilarious and tragic.