ZURICH.- In 2026, the Zurich Art Prize, awarded annually by Museum Haus Konstruktiv in cooperation with Zurich Insurance Company Ltd, goes to Rosa Barba. Born in Agrigento, Sicily, and now living in Germany, this artist is the 19th winner of the renowned award.
Rosa Barba’s artwork navigates the intersection of film, sculpture and installation, while consciously keeping the boundaries between them fluid. Barba’s complex universe can be experienced immediately upon entering the exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv. The artist transforms the various spaces into a multilayered setting that comprises sculptures, films, haunting soundtracks and the sound of projectors. Differently exposed strips of film become lines in the space, projecting light, making noises or mechanically looping. The divides between image, object and sound are thus dissolved.
Barba is primarily interested in film – albeit not merely as an image-producing medium, but as an open system, in which time, space and image keep intertwining in new ways. Her work is never solely about the moving image itself, but also about the kinetic potential of its presentation. The exhibition’s title, Thick Harmonies, refers to this multilayeredness that runs through Rosa Barba’s entire oeuvre: In her films, for instance, she superimposes narrative strands from documentary, fiction and narration, while on the acoustic level, she interweaves composed soundtracks with specific sounds, such as field recordings or the noises of film sculptures, which thus become musical instruments.
Like a drawing in the space, a construction made of curved steel pipes winds its way through the first exhibition hall. It provides an architectural framework, serves as a supporting structure for some of the works, and guides visitors through the presentation. The individual artworks follow their own rhythm, but come together to form a precisely staged whole that deals with themes such as light, language and time. Barba does not view time as a linear narrative, but as a densification of events – as an archive of traces, fragments and repetitions, in which past and future overwrite each other.
The first piece that visitors encounter is Off My Mind (2025), a flat, framed glass box, in which a looped strip of exposed celluloid with lettering is spun between two metal spools. The film is mechanically propelled through the glass box at high speed in one direction or the other. The lettering is only legible in moments of stillness, and never in its entirety. When the strip of film is in motion, it coils along the frame or accumulates randomly in the lower corners. These constantly shifting formations of the celluloid strip resemble a calligraphic line, or an image being drawn with a pen or brush. Barba has previously described this quality as ‘cinematic painting’.
The 16 mm film Radiant Exposures – Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (2022) builds on Barba’s long-standing engagement with the desert and utilisation thereof for modern technologies. The footage in Radiant Exposures shows large expanses of reflective panels that concentrate sunlight to generate and store energy. Gleaming light and deliberately blurred shots evoke the shimmer of summer heat, thus reinforcing the impression of an almost immaterial landscape imbued with energy – ethereal, timeless, unearthly, beautiful and menacing at the same time. For a brief moment, letters and lines of text cascade in front of the landscape images: Fragments from a poem by Robert Creeley (1926–2005) and lyrics by the musician and poet Sun Ra (1914–1993) become legible in a staggered sequence after several loops.
Two projectors standing opposite each other constitute the central elements of Colour Studies from 2013. Both devices project images of photographic filters in red, yellow and blue onto a screen positioned in the middle. Through the veil of the superimposed projections, the two devices enter into a visual dialogue, from which various new colour variations emerge.
There is also a musical dimension to this work: The screen is held by a music stand, bringing a musical score to mind, while rhythm is provided by the sequence and superimposition of the projected colours. The two projectors thus act as performers of a composition.
Composition in Field (2022) is a kinetic sculpture made of transparent film strips, on which fragments of text from Charles Olson’s manifesto Projective Verse (1950) are printed. In this text, the American poet calls for a form of poetry that develops from the flow of thinking and breathing, instead of adhering to fixed formal structures.
In Barba’s piece, the film strips move horizontally and vertically around a metal frame. Illuminated from behind by a light box, they produce a constantly transforming fabric of words, in which clear meanings are intentionally avoided. This is a kind of ‘poetry machine’ that keeps composing new poems – also in the mind of the individual reader who receives them.
The works in the series Weavers (2025) feature differently exposed strips of celluloid, woven together and around a metal frame, like threads in a textile fabric. At Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Barba presents two Weavers mounted one above the other, hovering just above the floor and slowly rotating. This brings out the various properties of the irregular, sometimes reflective, sometimes translucent woven structure particularly clearly.
About 2.5 metres above the floor, the curved steel construction continues to wind its way through the second exhibition hall, where As Fixed in Flux (2025) is the first work to be seen. This piece comprises a mechanical construction made of steel, aluminium and glass, within which, motorised spools and arms rotate. Loosely hanging on these, differently exposed strips of film constantly change their appearance as a result of the interplay between incident light and motion.
The 16 mm film Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021), projected onto the wall, was first shown in Cyprus in 2021. Here, in an area controlled by the United Nations, Rosa Barba had realised an artistic intervention, a place of encounter. The starting point for Rosa Barba’s project was the approximately 180-kilometre-long buffer zone that divides the island into a Greek Cypriot south and a Turkish Cypriot north. After first visiting it in 2013, Barba developed the concept of an open-air cinema in this zone. Completed in 2021, the cinema was constructed exclusively from locally sourced earth: a terraced open-air arena, integrated into the terrain, featuring a metal structure for the screen, on which films were regularly shown for residents of both the island’s halves.
In Barba’s film, a resident from each part of the island speaks, one male and one female. Their quiet voices, the female one in Greek and the male one in Turkish, are heard off-screen. They are complemented by fragments of English text, superimposed over the footage – sometimes in mirror writing. The real and the mythical intertwine here, to create multilayered imagery: Underwater shots of a shipwreck, images of ancient amphorae lying on the seabed, and footage of seaweed and sea urchins are interspersed with aerial views showing fragments of the island and an archaeological site. These are contrasted with images of the border zone: a disused airport littered with wrecks of cars and aeroplanes; dilapidated buildings inhabited by stray cats. At the same time, the film shows the construction of Barba’s open-air arena, as well as flocks of flamingos in flight. Thus, the cinematic space becomes denser, as different times, realities and perspectives engage within it: Transience becomes visible, and the buffer zone appears not just as a place of separation, but also as a passage for connections and encounters.
On the other side of the wall, in the piece Color Response (2022), two 16 mm projectors face each other. Their beams of light cross and overlap in the space. A loop of film runs through each projector and is threaded over a centrally positioned glass structure with rollers arranged in a ring. The strips of film, exposed using colour filters, create a flickering interplay of white, reds, oranges and yellows. In Color Response, as is the case in many of her works, Rosa Barba has manipulated the traditional apparatus of cinema in such a way that machines and materials generate new sculptural contexts.
The artwork Language Infinity Sphere (2025) is part of a series of sculptures and prints made using old metal letterpress blocks. As the original function of these letters has long since been taken over by new means of printing and distributing texts, they come to symbolise the instability of language and knowledge. Countless lead printing letters encase the surface of a steel sphere, thus forming a new printing block, from which prints can be made. At the same time, the sculpture defies any linguistic clarity: The letters condense as an all-over structure that follows the logic of form, rather than alphabetical order. They become a landscape, an image of ‘exploded’ language.
Language Infinity Sphere also served as the printing block for a special edition of prints that Rosa Barba has realised in the context of this exhibition in cooperation with Verein für Originalgraphik (Edition VFO), from whom the prints are available.
In the third exhibition space, the interweaving of film, light, performative objects and sound is quite striking.
Wirepiece (2022) consists of a drum string, held taut between ceiling and floor, and touched (or rather ‘played’) by a strip of film passing over it. Here, the celluloid strip takes on a dual role: On one hand, it creates a diffuse projection, while on the other, its movement causes the string to vibrate and produce sound. A silvery tone is heard, transforming the film apparatus into an acoustic instrument. As an electronic pickup amplifies the vibrations of the string, the characteristic fluttering sound of celluloid passing through the projector is also intensified.
In the piece Stating the Real Sublime (2009), installed in a window recess, a 16 mm film projector is suspended solely by the loops of a blank celluloid strip, which also runs through the projector itself. The very simplicity of this cinematic sculpture makes it astonishing: It seems almost inconceivable that a thin strip of celluloid could bear the weight of the heavy apparatus. As the celluloid is blank, the film projector merely projects a square of light onto the wall. Cinema is formulated as a concept.
The centrepiece of this exhibition space, however, is Barba’s 2025 film piece Charge. This 35 mm film, projected onto an angled wall, premiered last year at MoMA in New York and is being shown in Switzerland for the first time at Museum Haus Konstruktiv. Charge is a cinematic exploration of light as a source of ecological change and scientific innovation. On the basis of research conducted at the Nançay Radio Observatory, whose large radio telescopes appear repeatedly in the film, Barba filmed in remote landscapes, at solar parks, in physics laboratories (for instance at ETH Zurich) and at other sites of astronomical research. Using an analogue camera, she recorded numerous experiments as subtle irritations of perception, such as flickering light or vibrating surfaces, making it possible to experience laboratory experiments with invisible light by means of an optical lens.
The film opens with an exterior shot at sunset, in which the camera sweeps across hills and the sky. From there, Charge unfolds as a rhythmically pulsating assemblage of natural landscapes, scientific apparatus, radio waves, planetary imagery, stellar spheres, particle structures, abstract forms and optical phenomena.
Acoustically, Charge is underpinned by a multilayered soundscape. One central sound element is based on the gravitational lensing effect from astrophysics: the deflection of light and radio waves by large moving masses (e.g. galaxies). Barba takes gravitational lensing signals, which are neither visible to the naked eye nor audible, and translates them into sounds, thus making them sensorially perceptible. The film is enhanced and structured by a hybrid soundtrack comprising various recordings and rhythmic drumming.
Curated by Sabine Schaschl and Evelyne Bucher
