In Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler stands behind a kitchen counter, unsmiling, in an apron, and works her way through the alphabet, from A to Z, naming and demonstrating a kitchen utensil for each letter. An apron becomes a bowl becomes a chopper; by the time she reaches a nutcracker and a rolling pin, her gestures have turned from demonstration into something closer to violence, hacking and stabbing at the air with the deadpan intensity of a TV cooking show gone wrong. Of the piece, Rosler has said: “As the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.”

The work takes direct aim at two targets at once: the televised domesticity popularized by cooking programs of the period, and the formal, instructional language of early Conceptual art, its systems, alphabets and deadpan delivery, which Rosler turns back on itself to expose what those systems leave out. Described as a mockery of both TV cooking shows and Conceptual art, it remains among the most important video works of the twentieth century. Language here doesn’t describe the woman at the counter; it produces her, word by word, gesture by gesture, as a figure assembled entirely out of domestic labor.

Nearly three decades later, in 2003, Rosler revisited the piece at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, inviting an open call of participants, actresses, artists, curators and museum staff among them, to re-enact her original script in their own way, a restaging she later edited into a separate work, Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition.