Rosa Barba Stellar Populations, 2017/2022

Stellar Populations (2017) was specifically developed for Rosa Barba's 2017 exhibition at the Secession in Vienna. The kinetic sculptural work shows a 35mm film strip meandering away inside a light box, driven by a motor. In the celluloid’s uncontrollable movements a both anarchic and playful element is manifest.

Rosa Barba 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. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.