Curator: Kathrin Becker

The work of Rosa Barba represents a practice of artistic filmmaking, which goes far beyond the moving image. Her film installations and objects associate image, language, text and apparatus and generate a new pictorial materiality. Barba particularly examines industrial cinema and in her conceptual practice observes and questions its stagings, its formats, gestures and messages by removing them from their original context, creating and presenting them in a dazzling new manner. The two-time participant of the Venice Biennale at the n.b.k. shows the cinematic sculpture The Color Out of Space (2015). It includes footage of stars and planets, which the artist has shot in 2014/2015 in collaboration with the Hirsch observatory at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Additionally, Barba interviewed artists, writers and astronomers about the speculations of cinema and astronomy, including Ingrid Wiener, Barbara Hammer, Jean-Pierre Luminet, Matthew Newby and Oswald Wiener, and, in collaboration with the composer Jan St. Werner, combined these voices in a dense sound collage. Barba uses contrast in media and historically specific architectural contexts to think through how we describe—technically and speculatively—what exceeds our perception.

Rosa Barba (b. 1972 in Agrigento / Italy, lives in Berlin), studied theater and film studies in Erlangen and attended the Academy of Media Arts Cologne as well as the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions (selection): Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2016); Albertinum, Dresden (2015); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge/Mass. (2015); Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2014); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León (2013); Kunsthaus Zurich (2012); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012); Arter, Istanbul (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); Center for Contemporary Arts, Tel Aviv (2010); Dia Art Foundation, New York (2008); Villa Romana, Florence (2008); Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2005). Group exhibitions (selection): 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016); Venice Biennale (2015; 2009); Kunsthaus Graz (2015); Hong Kong Arts Centre (2015); 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); Łódź