Rosa Barba, Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, 2021
ROSA BARBA
Lives and works in Berlin and creates site-specific installations and interventions to analyse the ways in which cinema articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship.
Her cinematographic works are placed between the experimental documentary and the fictional narrative, introducing performative elements. They often focus on natural landscapes and human interventions on the environment and explore the relationship between historical documents, personal anecdotes and cinematographic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.
The artist has been invited by numerous international institutions to create solo exhibitions. Among the most recent: Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2022); Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin (2021-22); Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku (2020); ARTER, Istanbul (2019); Kunsthalle Bremen; Malmö Konsthall, (2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Secession, Vienna (2017).
She has participated in international exhibitions, including three editions of the Venice Biennale (2015, 2009, 2007), the San Paolo Biennale (2016), the Sydney and Berlin Biennale (2014).
Her films have won numerous awards at international festivals including the Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (2021), Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016) and CPH: DOX Copenhagen (2015). You have also won the PIAC Prix International d ’Art Contemporain of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco (2015) and the Nam June Paik Award (2010).
Festival Talk
November 17, 2022
Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze
Rosa Barba in conversation with Roberta Tenconi, curator Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
Works
November 15–20, 2022
CANGO Cantieri Goldonetta
Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage
Installation - 16mm film transferred to digital and 8k film, 2021, sound, 31'15''
Italian Premiere
The work was created at the invitation of the Point Center for Contemporary Art (Nicosia, Cyprus) and curator Mirjam Varadinis. The artist chose the 180-kilometre Dead Zone that divides the north from the south of the island as the starting point for her intervention in Cyprus. Between underwater shots of the Mazotos shipwreck, a merchant ship from the 4th century BC, and aerial shots of archaeological sites, the film looks at the Mediterranean Sea and its history as a link for trade and cultural exchange between East and West, but also as a symbol of the separation between the northern and southern parts of the world.
Film still © Rosa Barba / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare, Milano/Pescara
November 16, 2022
Cinema La Compagnia
Plastic Limits - For the Projection of Other Architectures
35mm film, 2021, colour, optical sound, 14’40’’
Made for the artist’s solo show for the reopening of the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin) in 2021, the film is structured as a dialogue with the Mies van der Rohe building that houses it, shot during its renovation. The work explores the museum’s interiors and exteriors, also in relation to other Berlin buildings, opening a new vision on the intangible components of architecture such as duration, transparency and the relationship with the bodies that inhabit it.
Film still © Rosa Barba / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare, Milano/Pescara
November 16, 2022
Cinema La Compagnia
Subconscious Society, a Feature
35mm film, 2014, colour, optical sound, 40’
The film alternates aerial shots of river or coastal landscapes and industrial sites with images of some military outposts on the water built during the Second World War, connected with the interiors of the abandoned Albert Hall in Manchester, activated by the artist through performance. The work, like a state between sleep and wakefulness, creates new non-rational associations between spaces in different geographical areas.
Film still © Rosa Barba / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare, Milano/Pescara
November 17, 2022
Cinema La Compagnia
Aggregate States of Matters
35 mm film, 2019, colour, optical sound, 21’14’’
The film addresses the growing impact of climate change in the planet’s remotest areas. Filmed in the Andes, in a deep dialogue with local communities, the work focuses on the ambivalent negotiation between nature and culture, showing the blurred boundaries between human and non-human beings within the communities affected by the melting of the glaciers.
Film still © Rosa Barba / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare, Milano/Pescara
November 17, 2022
Cinema La Compagnia
Time as Perspective
35mm film, 2012, colour, optical sound, 12’
Shot in the vast, barren Texas desert landscape, the film shows an expanse of huge oil pumps repeating the same motion over and over again. In addition to capturing the sculptural and meditative quality that these mechanical bodies bring to the landscape, the work touches on social and political issues related to the exploitation of natural resources.
Film still © Rosa Barba / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare, Milano/Pescara
November 17, 2022
Cinema La Compagnia
The Empirical Effect
16mm film transferred to digital, 2010, colour, sound, 22’
The topographical starting point of the film is the area around Vesuvius, where survivors of the last eruption of 1944 still live, the so-called Red Zone. Between reality and fiction, the work revolves around the volcano, the protagonist and metaphor of the complex relations between society and politics in Italy, unpredictable in its destructive force and located in the middle of a densely populated area along the Mediterranean coast.
Film still © Rosa Barba / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare, Milano/Pescara