Closely aligned with the appropriation strategies of the artists of the Pictures Generation, her emphasis on film and television as her source material ensured she was also an integral part of the video art movement. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery, having first shown at the seminal Eau de Cologne at Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne, in 1987.

The show begins, viewable from the street, with works from her TV Text & Image series. A number of television monitors broadcast live television, each tuned to a different channel. 24-hour news streams raucously compete with teleshopping, cartoons and mundane sitcom re-runs. Carefully chosen, often politicized, phrases are superimposed over the images, applied to the screen in black vinyl text. NARCOTICS OF SURREALISM. MILITARY RESEARCH. PEOPLE WITH AIDS.

Both realized as single-screen works, which convey an intrusion into domestic television consumption, as well as site-specific arrangements, Bender’s TV Text & Image series was a major part of her artistic output throughout the late 80’s and early 90’s. In contrast to her larger ‘Electronic Theater’ installations where she highlights her skill as an editor, manipulating everyday moving images into aggressive montages, here she allows the cadence of typical broadcasts TV to remain unaltered, allowing the simple intervention of text to filter the content.

On the first floor of the gallery, Aggressive Witness – Active Participant, 1990 combines the live television streams of the TV Text & Image works with computer generated imagery. White lines on a black background produce pulsating abstract shapes that form and dissolve across four of the twelve monitors, these choreographed digital designs state of the art in 1990. Their sci-fi resemblances are accentuated with a soundtrack by her musical collaborator Stuart Argabright, his sinisterly crunchy and rumbling soundscape adding a sense of ascending unease.

The opening sequence of He-Man is swiftly followed by news footage of missiles firing in international conflicts, juxtaposed with corporate idents such as the AT&T logo that Bender likened to the Death Star, and distorted animated heads that contort their way across the screens. Again, the viewer is overloaded with information, subject to the powerfully attractive pull of broadcast media.

The work also sets the stage for her later commercial work, including music videos she produced for R.E.M., New Order and Megadeth, each of which transposed the same degree of criticality and disjointed production to the slickness of the then-new MTV.