LISBON.- For her first large-scale exhibition in Portugal, Rosa Barba presents a new site-specific, choreographed installation, drawing on and expanding a range of conceptual threads she has explored over the years.

With Drawing Vocabularies, Rosa Barba is the third artist to be offered a ‘carte blanche’ to intervene in the Nave space and to select works from the CAM Collection. This speculative engagement with histories, storage spaces and memory underlines the artist’s longstanding interest in archival possibilities and places where fact and fiction meet to foster new stories and hidden conversations. The exhibition also explores how archives can construct nonlinear experiences of time. Through site-specific installation, performance, film, and sound, Barba reshapes and reimagines these structures, effectively ‘redrawing’ their vocabularies.

The title Drawing Vocabularies suggests unstable and open-ended processes. It evokes sustained explorations of liminal spaces and the bending of possibilities for reorganising space by deconstructing the cinematic apparatus and filmic environment to reveal spaces beyond cinema. Drawing Vocabularies celebrates attentiveness and elasticity, presenting a vibrant kinetic environment that continuously rearranges and reactivates its own structures.

Rosa Barba was born in Italy and lives and works in Berlin.

She 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.