ZAGREB.- Rosa Barba's exhibition Meaning Distances opens this year's 25 FPS Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, bringing together a selection of sculptural film works. Barba’s conceptual explorations of film probe historical records, personal narratives, and the sensory experience of cinema and sound, often by recording natural landscapes and human-made changes to the environment. Landscape acts here as a pivotal actor in relation to transforming socio-political, cultural and architectural situations. Using performative framing as a strategic device, her films question the instability of knowledge, explore myths, and scientific experiments.
Rosa Barba was born in Italy. The artist currently lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne followed by a fellowship at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam; and has completed her PhD with the title "On the Anarchic Organisation of Cinematic Spaces: Evoking Spaces beyond Cinema" at the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University in 2018.
The artist has been awarded various prizes, i.e. the 46th PIAC, International Prize for Contemporary Art, of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2015 and the Calder Prize in 2020. Barba has held residencies at the Atelier Calder, France; Baltic Art Center, Visby, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Iaspis, Stockholm; and Artpace, San Antonio, among others.
Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyze the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.
Her work has been exhibited at numerous international institutions. Upcoming solo exhibitions will be held at MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, and Museum Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (both in 2025). Recent selected solo exhibitions include: The Ocean of One's Pause, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); Under The Canopy, MdbK, Leipzig (2025) Evoking a Space Beyond the Cinema, MALI Museum, Lima (2024); Rosa Barba: The Hidden Conference, The Tanks at Tate Modern, London (2023); Rosa Barba: Emanations, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Perth (2023); Rosa Barba: Weavers, CCC OD – centre de création contemporaine olivier debré, Tours (2022); Rosa Barba – Art Club #36, The French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, Rome (2022); Rosa Barba: Exhibition Notes, Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2022); Rosa Barba: In a Perpetual Now, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021); Rosa Barba: Pillage of the Sea, permanent sculpture for Beaufort Triennial, Belgium (2021); Rosa Barba, Touched by the Same Breath of Air, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku (2020); Rosa Barba: The Hidden Conference, ARTER, Istanbul (2019); Rosa Barba, Armory Park Avenue, New York (2019); Rosa Barba: Send Me Sky, Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2018); Rosa Barba: Drawn by the Pulse, Tabakalera, International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastián (2018); Rosa Barba: Solar Flux Recordings, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2017); Rosa Barba: From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017); Rosa Barba: Spacelength Thought, Vienna Secession (2017); Rosa Barba: Elements of Conduct, Malmö Konsthall (2017); Rosa Barba: From Source to Poem, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2016); Rosa Barba: Blind Volumes, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016).
In 2021, Rosa Barba inaugurated Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, 2021, a permanent Open-Air Cinema sculpture in the United Nations Buffer Zone in Deryneia, Cyprus and Pillage of the Sea, a permanent sculpture in the sea in Ostende, during the Beaufort Biennial.
The artist’s work is held in the following collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis ; Staatliche Museen Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Staatliche Museen Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Tate Modern, London; Collezione MAXXI, Rome; Mart – Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea (GAM), Turin; Castello di Rivoli, Piemonte; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; Mali, Lima; Kunsthaus Zürich; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Vehbi Koc Fondation, Istanbul; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku
