Rosa Barba

About

During the last 15 years, the Italian-German artist Rosa Barba (*1972) has created a concep­tual work of poetic density with her films, sculp­tures and printed editions. Her work, often based on histor­ical or loca­tion-based research, revolves around basic ques­tions such as the medial nature of time and memory, and the inter­ac­tion of form and artistic content. Barba focuses on film: as a medium, mate­rial and metaphor, as a narra­tive form and char­ac­ter­istic dispos­i­tive for the visual culture of the 20th century. She usually shoots her films in tradi­tional 16mm or 35mm formats in arcane loca­tions, and creates fantas­tical sugges­tions by inter­weaving docu­men­tary and fictional elements. Her sculp­tural objects and spatial inter­ven­tions equally examine cine­matic aspects and move in a field between mate­rial and imma­te­rial pres­ence. Rosa Barba’s cine­matic-sculp­tural oeuvre has been presented inter­na­tion­ally in numerous solo and group exhi­bi­tions in recent years. For the Rotunda of the SCHIRN, the Berlin-based artist devised a new work responding to the specific condi­tions of this freely acces­sible public area.