A Residency & Installation

Giving new life to old things, Randi Malkin Steinberger provides a window into the lives of the forgotten through a vast collection of found photographs, slides, and tintypes that she has gathered over years of trolling flea markets, eBay, and other sources. Salvaging and protecting these abandoned objects, Steinberger honors the memories embedded within them.

While this treasure trove of found images offers glimpses into the lives and loves of others, Steinberger’s interventions transform the photographs into objects of wonder and mystery. Embellishing these once-forgotten pictures with thread, nail polish, and Rorschach blots, the artist prompts viewers to imagine the stories they hold while acknowledging the stories we bring to them.

Just as Steinberger preserves the memories of other people, she also documents her own life in notebooks and drawings and in text and video. Part of an examined life, her practice is a search for meaning and beauty in the quotidian acts of living and making.

At MASS MoCA, Steinberger will set up a studio in Building 8, creating an ever-evolving environment that functions as work space, archive, installation, and cabinet of curiosities. The artist invites the public in to witness the daily practice of making and to consider the questions, connections, and possibilities it creates.

About the Artist:
Randi Malkin Steinberger’s experience as a photographer and filmmaker was shaped by her studies in Italy, where she lived for ten years while launching a photography school and gallery. Her work has been shown at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, The Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence, Italy, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, NY among others. She has produced artists’ books that are now part of the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, Chicago’s Art Institute and Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Getty Research Institute Special Collections, LA.
 
Malkin Steinberger’s documentary films include Holi-days which aired on the Sundance Channel. She has made music videos for Hen House Studios, collaborating with such artists as Sunny War, B. Wurtz, and Particle Kid.
 
Among her projects, she has published two books of her collaborations with renowned artist Alighiero Boetti: Accanto al Pantheon, published by Prearo Editore in Milan, and Boetti by Afghan People: Peshawar, Pakistan, 1990, published by RAM Publications. Her book No Circus, a collection of photographs of structures colorfully tented for fumigation, includes an essay by D.J. Waldie and was published by Damiani.