Michael Blum (born 1966 in Jerusalem) is an artist using a variety of media, ranging from photography and video to books, installations, objects, text, printed matter.
His work has been shown at numerous venues including the Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), the New Museum (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), Kunsthalle Vienna, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Baltic, Istanbul, Torino and Tirana Biennials.
Initially and under influence of the OuLiPo, his interest focused on language and classification systems : Choses à récupérer chez Milena à l’exception des meubles, de l’aspirateur et des rideaux, qui seront repris lors d’un déménagement ultérieur (1992), Blum's first video, is an exhaustion of all possible relations between word and object, after a found list of objects written by an unknown manic person.
C’est la vie (1996), a series of poetic obituaries based on French fin-de-siecle journalist and anarchist Felix Feneon, and recorded on almost extinct Super-8 stock, is both hilarious and tragic.
In The Language Course (2000), a collaboration with Carlos Amorales and NGO El Caracol in Mexico City, Blum learnt Spanish from former street kids they were working with.
The Monument to the Birth of the 20th Century (OK Centrum Linz, 2004, published as a book in 2005 By Revolver) was a political speculation based on the common schooling of Hitler and Wittgenstein, steps away from the inviting art center.
At the 9th Istanbul biennial (2005), Blum presented A Tribute to Safiye Behar, a museum dedicated to a controversial lover of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, raising questions and eyebrows.