With a respect for the freedom to work and disdain for the rhetoric of freedom and with a love/hate relationship with the concepts of political leadership and power, artists – from installation genius Paul McCarthy to the ruthlessly honest graphist Kara Walker – splay their country’s ambiguities across the American art landscape.

Video artist Birnbaum does the same – though in a generally more interpretive way – and has been for more than 35 years. Ghent’s modern art museum, SMAK, has a long history of supporting Birnbaum’s work, and this is the artist’s first major exhibition in more than 20 years. A pioneer in video art, Birnbaum’s work from the early 1990s could easily have been made yesterday.

Two architectural installations particularly reveal that turn-of-the-millennium politics repeats itself. “Transmission Tower: Sentinel”, from 1992, involves an arched vertical pole lined with small monitors that flicker scenes from the 1988 US presidential campaign: George Bush Sr’s famous “thousand points of light” speech and the National Student Convention, featuring Allen Ginsberg’s recitation of his poem “Hum Bom!”

Right next to it is “Hostage”, a more complicated video narrative that she made two years later, in which human firing range targets on Plexiglas are mounted in front of monitors hung from the ceiling that show news footage from the infamous kidnapping and murder of German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction in 1977. Televisions placed at either end of the group of monitors are connected by a laser beam; step in front of the beam, and all action comes to a stop.

While the first installation is a chilling reminder that Americans seem purposefully to use their voting rights to repeat recent tragedy, the second questions our own place – as both victim and perpetrator – in media hype lending a source of power to terrorism. (It’s also, on a basic level, a reminder that terrorist rhetoric and accompanying imagery is nothing new, although fleeting enough to need to be repeated with generational frequency.)

Birnbaum analyses media images in all her work, achieving a sort of “talk back” to popular representations, especially of women. This shot her to notoriety in the 1970s, when the television image became ever more expansive, and she rebelled against the notion of the “passive viewer”. Made up of a sort of technological “found art”, her most famous works from the period are the short videos “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” and “Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry”.

The first takes scenes from the (ultra-cheesy) 1970s TV show Wonder Woman, stopping and repeating them, to emphasise that the “power of woman” might not have been quite as important to TV executives as shapely actress Lynda Carter wearing nearly nothing. The second takes images of famous women (and girls) from the popular television game show Hollywood Squares, again employing repetition – this time to show how the camera can shape “feminine” gestures and responses.

Although both of these are hugely important to a retrospective on Birnbaum, they are not the most engaging pieces on view. Aside from the architectural installations, those prizes go to the larger video and sound works, most of which are housed in their own darkened rooms. The most intriguing of these is a piece Birnbaum put together right here in Belgium a few years ago during the video biennial Contour in Mechelen. Having witnessed both an in-studio recording of DJs at Radio Donna and the work of the only manufacturer of traditional tapestries left in Flanders, she constructed an installation in which footage of Donna’s DJ Yasmine shows simultaneously on the wall and on the fibres of a large loom. The images appear to be being woven into a tapestry just like the actual Flemish tapestries hanging on the other walls.

Considering that tapestries have been historically used to illustrate upper-class activities and major news items – battles, coronations, hunting parties – the piece simultaneously suggests the new ways in which images are burned into our minds and how fleeting they really are. Video images disappear the moment we stop watching them, usually never to return again. Birnbaum called the piece “Elegy for Donna” – a radio station that went off the air three years later.

Once again, the artist looks into her crystal TV screen and pulls out the future.

Dara Birnbaum: the dark matter of media light
Until 2 August
SMAK, Citadelpark, Ghent

www.smak.be