DRESDEN.- “Spaces for species (and pieces)” is Rosa Barba’s first monographic exhibition in a German museum including works made over the last five years encompassing cinematic projections, as well as a selection of sculptural installations.

The installation “The Hidden Conference” (2010-2015) is the main focus of the exhibition: a three-part series of filmic investiga-tions into museum storage and the status of art when it is not on display. Each of the films imagines the discussions that artworks in the museum storage spaces might have with one another. The Hidden Conference is a work that confirms Barba’s continuing investigation of cultural storage areas and archives: the stored art works become protagonists in a filmic narrative that unfolds in front of a handheld camera; their invisible nexuses and the condition of silent coexistence are enlivened besides scientific or chronological claims by the restless camerawork and the montage of textual fragments, filmic pictures and sound-elements.

Her sculptures, films and installations can be understood against the background of an expanded definition of sculpture. Although questions of composition and form continue to play an important role in the perception of her work, the most prominent concept is what Rosalind Krauss describes as an “increasing temporalisation”. This aspect, as well as Barba’s interest in how film articulates space, places the work and the viewer in a new relationship, which is also reflected in the content of the films.

Her longer film works are situated between experimental documen-tary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in time. They often focus on natural landscapes and man-made inter-ventions into the environment and probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation.

Alongside film works in the Albertinum, there are also more sculptural pieces that often also examine the physical properties of the projector, celluloid, and projected light. These works use projected images, linguistic memories, and real or imagined ob-jects as their central focus.

Barba, who was once described as a “poetic structuralist”, is less interested in film as a machine for creating illusion, than as a system of signs that we recognise as “film”. As a struc-turalist she dissects and analyses her medium; from a “poetic” perspective a narrative content can be perceived in her work. She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information and documents, taking them out of the context in which they are normally seen and reshaping and representing them anew.

Barba was born in 1972 in Agrigento, Italy, but grew up in Germa-ny, and now lives and works in Berlin. She studied theatre and film at the University of Erlangen, visual arts and film at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and held a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van Beedende Kunsten in Amsterdam. One of the most internationally renowned artists working in film, this year saw her exhibit for a second time at the Venice Biennale, as well as a current major exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA. Barba’s solo exhibitions in recent years have been held at venues that have included, among others, the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Tate Modern in London and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.