Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba (b. 1972; lives in Berlin) is an artist with a sculptural approach to film and the ways it articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Her works encompass films, sculptures, installations, text pieces, and publications grounded in the material and conceptual qualities of cinema. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role in the perception of 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. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in time. They often focus on natural landscapes and man-made interventions into the environment and probe the relationship between historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.

She has had solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide (including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Malmö Konsthall; CAPC Bordeaux; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA; MAXXI, Rome; Tate Modern, London) and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials (including the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale). Her work is part of several collections and has been widely published. In 2016, Rosa Barba was awarded the 46th International Prize for Contemporary Art by the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco.