Title: The Birth of the Black Madonna
Year of Performance: 2005
Reconstruction: 2025
Medium: Video installation, 25 recycled TV screens of different sizes
Exhibition: Photo Schweiz 2025, Kongresshaus Zürich

Timelapse of the video installation “The Birth of the Black Madonna” at Kongresshaus Zürich, Photo Schweiz 2025, showing the work and its audience.

Music : David Vostell

The Birth of the Black Madonna – Video Installation, 2005 / Reconstructed 2025

This installation consists of 25 recycled TV screens of different sizes, salvaged from the streets, displaying the video of the 2005 performance The Birth of the Black Venus. The screens create a fragmented, immersive environment where the Black Madonna emerges across multiple surfaces, transforming discarded technology into a contemporary altar. By combining the Renaissance spirit of Venice with today’s digital techniques, the work celebrates feminine power, artistic freedom, and the city itself as a living stage of memory, beauty, and resistance.

The 25 recycled TV screens vary in format and frequency, requiring extensive technical coordination to make them work together. Each screen carries its own history, technical quirks, and years of use and repair, giving it a unique vibration. Using discarded screens that others would throw away transforms the project into a sustainable artistic idea. Despite the difficulty of coordination, the differences in each screen’s rhythm and vibration contribute to the immersive, living quality of the installation.