Judith Barry’s Imagination, dead imagine at The Museum of Modern Art

Now on view, ongoing Gallery 207, Floor 2, The David Geffen Wing

The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53 Street

New York, NY 10019 Judith Barry’s Imagination, dead imagine (1991) has entered the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is now on view in a dedicated presentation in Gallery 207 on the second floor of the David Geffen Wing. The presentation is ongoing. MoMA records the work as a gift of Nicole Klagsburn.

Imagination, dead imagine, installation view, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 2017.

First exhibited at Fundación “la Caixa” in Madrid in 1991, Imagination, dead imagine is a five-channel video and sound installation built around a ten-foot cube. An androgynous human head appears contained within the architecture while the sound of slow breathing fills the surrounding space. At intervals, the image is covered by substances resembling bodily fluids. The spectator’s response shifts between repulsion and fascination, making the act of looking itself part of the work.

Imagination, dead imagine, installation under construction, Fundación “la Caixa,” Madrid, 1991.

The title comes from Samuel Beckett’s 1965 prose text Imagination dead imagine, in which bodies are imagined within a confined geometric environment. Beckett’s use of enclosure, repetition and psychological interiority provided one conceptual point of departure for Barry’s installation. The work also engages Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject: the experience of encountering something that unsettles the boundaries between self and other. Within the installation, bodily matter becomes simultaneously disturbing and visually compelling.

Architecture is equally central to the work. The cubic form recalls the formal language of Minimalism, while the projected body introduces something unstable, organic and vulnerable into that geometry. MoMA describes the work as bringing visceral bodily experience into tension with the sterile architecture of commercial and institutional spaces and with the distancing effects of mass media.

Imagination, dead imagine, concept collage and image study, 1991.

The historical conditions of 1991 also form part of the work’s context. Imagination, dead imagine emerged during the AIDS epidemic, the expansion of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the early development of the World Wide Web. Images were assuming an increasingly central role in how political events, bodies and identities were experienced and understood.

Imagination, dead imagine, installation view, Berardo Museum, Lisbon, 2008.

Seen again in 2026, the installation exists within a substantially different technological environment. Continuous screen use, algorithmically selected images, biometric surveillance, artificial intelligence and digitally constructed identities have altered both the circulation of images and the position of the spectator. Questions that were present in 1991 about mediation, observation and the relationship between bodies and technology can therefore be encountered from another historical position.

Imagination, dead imagine, installation view and video sequence, Fundación “la Caixa,” Madrid, 1991.

Over more than three decades, the work has been presented in Madrid, Lisbon and New York. Its current installation at MoMA places it within the museum’s collection while allowing it to be encountered again as a spatial, bodily and philosophical proposition, rather than as a historical object alone.

Imagination, dead imagine is currently on view in Gallery 207, Floor 2, The David Geffen Wing, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.