Rosa Barba, Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage – a Special Presentation for Mies in Mind

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This special presentation celebrates both the reopening of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and Rosa Barba’s major solo exhibition there, Rosa Barba: In a Perpetual Now, opening August 22, 2021.

Inside the Outset is a project that consists of two parts: a film and a long-term open-air cinema installation within the 180-kilometer UN-controlled 'Green Line Buffer Zone' in Cyprus. This area divides the island along its North-South axis, and forms the origin point of Rosa Barba’s artistic intervention.

The project started seven years ago when Barba first visited the island and proposed a cinema sculpture in the Buffer Zone. The inaugural ceremony of the Open-Air Cinema will take place on September 10, 2021, with the projection of the film Inside the Outset along with films selected by the project’s Advisory Board of artists from each side of the Green Line and beyond. Visitors from both sides of the island will be able to enter the Buffer Zone, which is usually closed to civilians.

The film was exclusively shot in Cyprus, including underwater shots of the Mazotos shipwreck, as well as aerial shots of archaeological sites. The film follows Barba’s artistic approach of examining liminal states which manifest in between contested spaces, both mentally and geographically, in order to offer a new perspective.

Barba envisions the location of this open-air installation as a meeting point for the members of all communities on the island. Her intention is to highlight the capacity of art to create spaces of interaction and coexistence.

Continuing at Esther Schipper through August 28, Fixed in Fleeting: Performative Objects and Tape Journals, is a presentation of Barba’s work that foregrounds the artist’s sculptural approach to the very medium of film—celluloid—both as material and as repository of knowledge, as well as Printed Cinema, a series published alongside Barba’s film projects, creating a kind of secondary literature, sourced from film stills, text, and photographs, including research material and unused filmic fragments.

Rosa Barba: In a Perpetual Now opens at the Neue Nationalgalerie on Sunday, August 22, 2021 and continues through January 16, 2022.

Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage has been made in partnership with Famagusta Avenue Garage along with communities on both sides of the Buffer Zone and Point Centre for Contemporary Art. It received the first prize at the international competition of the Italian Council (Third Edition) in 2018, and was awarded a grant from DGAAP (Directorate General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries), Italy.