Rosa Barba
30 April - 04 June 2011
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| © Rosa Barba
The Hidden Conference: about the discontinuous history of things we see and don't see, 2010
35mm film, optical sound
9.30 min. |
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ROSA BARBA
30 April – 4 June 2011
We are happy to announce the first solo exhibition of our artist Rosa
Barba at carlier | gebauer, opening at the Berlin Gallery Weekend 2011.
With her filmic works and sculptures, which she exhibited widely in
major institutions for contemporary art in Europe, Rosa Barba (born 1972
in Agrigent/Italy) has fundamentally recontextualized the discourse of
celluloid-formats in the visual arts today. In her manifold techniques
Barba challenges her own medium, the 16 mm and 35 mm film, as a historic
innovation of modernism – and demonstrates, that his epoch, as much as
the medium itself, remained incomplete, open for aesthetic, narrative
and technical potentialities. The artist turns the celluloid into a
contemporary and living medium, into an artistic field in which past and
present are retranslated into one another.
At carlier | gebauer, Rosa Barba shows six works of the last two years,
which demonstrate the wide angle of her artistic production. In her
objects she identifies the narrations of historical cartographies,
diagrammatic texts and demonstrates the ensnared operations of the
projectors themselves. Barba’s works bring together views onto a medium
in a state of disappearance and its radical presence. She investigates
in the forms of the content and the contents of the forms, finds visual,
temporal and spatial differences in that which hardly ever meets our
everyday gaze, the undergrounds, the archives, deserts and landscapes.
Barba’s works delineate a search, in which new starting points are
demonstrated, news lives of things and people. She demonstrates a
sculptural approach to society itself as a structure, which transforms
what was unrelated into a relation. Barba demonstrates dispositions of
the unrelated.
In the main space of the gallery the 35 mm film The Hidden Conference:
about the discontinuous history of things we see and we don‘t see (2010)
will be presented as a ground-covering projection. Equipped with a
hand-held camera, Barba entered the storage of the Neue National-galerie
in Berlin, a "memory location of cultural memory”. Here, unseen and
uncurated works encounter one another in an endless line of objects,
which, ordered by alphabet or by year, open up another art history.
Generations of cultural hegemony, of political systems and curatorial
fashions celebrate their oblivion in these dark rooms. The camera
observes a fictive, unwatched conference of a rejected art history,
which Barba drags into the light for a short moment to demonstrate that
those who were deserted have long ago established new affinities with
one another.
The 16mm work A Private Tableaux (2010) turns this gaze around and
points the camera at a series of drawings, which only remain art for as
long as their perceiver cannot decipher them. Just as The Hidden
Conference also this film begins with short fragments of text,
introducing the perspective one is lead into, staging the scenery and -
again and again – dividing it with textual insertions. The camera
navigates along sparsely lit walls of a system of tunnels on which the
engineers have been marking flaws and cracks for decades. Those
drawings, left by men, cover almost each section of the wall, but still
this network of deficiencies prevents the structure’s breakdown. The
traces of all these cracks in the arches of the tunnel, their
repetitions in chalk demonstrate, just like the artworks in the storage,
an indirect imprint of what waits outside, of the ruling narrations of
art history in one and of the menacing traffic above ground in the other
case. The boundaries of art are opened up within a filmic archive of
views, which construct new relations out of old rejections.
The three installative projections Invisible Act (2010), One way out
(2009) and Double Whistler (2011), present further inversions of the
shown in the act of showing. In Invisible Act the celluloid of a 16 mm
film takes its course over an external reel, at which a metal ball
circles on the celluloid, in One way out (2009) the strip is diverted in
its ways by the projector itself, gravitating towards the maelstrom of a
ventilation pipe installed at the ceiling and in Double Whistler (2011)
the celluloid strips of a film are lead around two conspiring
projectors in seemingly endless channels. On this strip, a conversation
is recorded, which timed with the projectors, returns in bits and
pieces. Drawings, texts and projections are lead through the apparatus
and re-performed by it. The collaboration of the apparatuses, in the
case of Invisible Act that of the metal ball and the film strip,
generates an effect which stretches far beyond its individual parts.
Within the projection on the wall the turning of the metal ball and the
movement of the film are still decipherable, but they seem to introduce
also a new form, a new content in itself. Reality re-emerges as a
relation in constant flux, which leaks and cracks and in which clearness
is not that of an authentic representation but rather that of a shadow
play.
The second new work - Optic Ocean (2011) - in Rosa Barba’s exhibition
at carlier | gebauer consists of a large, untreated canvas on which a
text is printed in a double silkscreen print in red and green, which
seems to shift into a distortion of phase in front of the viewer’s
eyes. The text quotes a film script, that is based on the first
science-fiction narrative entitled "Somnium”, envisaged by the
philosopher and optician Johannes Kepler – in which he demonstrated a
parallelism. As the ocean, which it deals with again and again, the
lines move in front of the eyes, as a projection which got out of joint,
and now is splitted into two colours. What in another genre would
classify as a format of history painting in Barba’s case becomes the
cinematographic ground of a projection, which gives rise to the question
what its reverberations onto history painting might be.
Rosa Barba studied at the University of Erlangen and at the Academy of
Media Arts Cologne, followed by a two year residency at the
Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. A comprehensive solo
exhibition of her work is currently on view at the Kunstverein
Braunschweig (until May 22, 2011). Her work was widely exhibited at a.o.
the Tate Modern Level 2 Gallery, London (2010/2011), at the Center of
Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2010), at the Centre International d‘Art et
du Paysage de l‘ile de Vassiviere (2010), at the Villa Romana in
Florence (2008) and at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2007). On
May 28th, 2011 two institutional solo exhibitions will open at the
Foundation Galleria Civica-Center of Research on Contemporary Art,
Trento and the MART Museum, Rovereto, Italy. On this occasion,
Hatje-Cantz Press will publish a monograph on her work.
www.carliergebauer.com
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