(A) Drift of politics: Laverne & Shirley

A Drift of Politics, one of Dara Birnbaum's first video installations, is about the love affairs of two middle-class women. Using the vocabulary of soap opera, the artist humorously highlights television’s narrative mechanisms.

A real-time and a silent slow-motion film are simultaneously shown on two screens. This device raises the viewer’s awareness of how narrative sways how we think. The heroines are role models viewers can relate to. But they are diverted from their roles to become vehicles critiquing the media’s conditioning of women's behaviour.

A Drift of Politics was shown for the first time by the Pinault Collection during the 2008 exhibition “Passage du Temps” (“Passage of Time”) at the Tri Postal in Lille.