Introduction

With Exhibition Notes, Rosa Barba presents an installation that fills the gallery space, turning it into a coherent visual ensemble. It includes Blind Volumes (2016/2022), a work that uses steel frames as a support, a kind of stage on which films and kinetic sculptures are displayed.

Eight further artworks are choreographed around the gallery, transforming it into a place for experimentation. The gallery thus becomes a space where the constitutive elements of film, celluloid, projector and sound are presented: elements that often remain invisible, overlooked, and unexplored precisely because they are so obvious. By placing the various components of film in new experimental constellations, the artist liberates them from their original uses. “In my work”, says Barba, “I interrogate the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information, and documentation, taking them out of their conventional contexts and reshaping and representing them anew. In this way, I experiment with and expand time-based forms into sculptural objects or speculations, that is, into spaces that are self-organized; it is an ever-changing, ever-evolving shifting process.”

Through her use of a steel construction which is both drawing and supporting space, the artist brings a dynamic interpretation of its constituent parts to the gallery space. In so doing, she invites the viewer to adopt different perspectives, focus on the artworks individually or as a whole. Both the basic physical elements and the metaphysical concepts thus become key vehicles for thinking about film as a process, a medium and, ultimately, a message.

The exhibition is curated by Alenka Gregorič.

Rosa Barba
Exhibition Notes
Basement Gallery
Cukrarna
Poljanski nasip 40
1000 Ljubljana
February 8 – May 1, 2022
www.cukrarna.art