Martha Rosler

Rosler formulated, earlier than almost anyone, the paradox now debated in every city: artists occupy cheap warehouses in run-down districts, make them attractive, and within a few years neither they nor the original residents can pay the rent. She did not say it from outside but as an implicated party, which is why her criticism still stings.

Her project If You Lived Here, three exhibitions and a series of debates at New York's Dia Art Foundation in 1989, took the idea to its limit: instead of exhibiting works about housing, she handed the gallery to homeless organisations, tenant unions, architects and squatters, who filled the space with their own material. The book documenting the project remains a reference for art and urban activism.

Born in Brooklyn in 1943, Rosler has worked with photography, video, installation and text since the 1960s. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974) photographs the shopfronts of a street of alcoholics without ever photographing a person, and sets beside them the words the language uses to name them: a frontal critique of documentary photography that turns poverty into a consumable image.

Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) is one of the most cited videos in feminist art, and her series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home photomontaged the Vietnam war into interiors from decorating magazines. Culture Class (2013) gathers her essays on the creative economy and dismantles Richard Florida's theses: where he sees an engine of development, Rosler sees artists employed, usually without knowing it, as the first phase of a property operation.