ART-PRESENTATION: Rosa Barba-Elements of Conduct
Rosa Barba’s works encompassing sculptures, installations, text pieces, and publications are grounded in the material qualities of cinema. Her film sculptures examine the physical properties of the projector, celluloid, and projected light. Barba’s longer projected works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in the past or the future.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Malmö Konsthall Archive
“Elements of Conduct” is the title of Rosa Barba’s solo exhibition at Malmö Konsthall. Her work relates in various ways to filmic methods and genres. The artist’s interest in the narrative techniques of cinema is highly important in her works. It results in a series of experimental approaches in which all elements can work together and become conveyors of meaning – the purely visual, the technical equipment and the sound. The art works do not lock different genres in place but rather give an impression of dissolving them: here documentary is combined with fiction, myth with reality, tangible material with textual elements and poetry. In Malmö Konsthall one expression of this method is the large, centrally placed structure, entitled “Blind Volumes” (2016) construct functions as a platform and vertical stage for several works, orchestrated in a spatial layout, whilst simultaneously being able to liaise with the exhibition hall’s extensive volume and with the architecture. The installation is complemented with projections in several formats (70, 35 and 16 millimetre), in which the film equipment itself is exhibited and becomes part of the work. Her film “Somnium” (2011) was partly inspired by Ludwig Kepler’s eponymous novel published in 1634, which is a treatise on astronomy and considered to be the first work of science fiction. Barba’s film depicts the icy shores and industrial harbors of the European North Sea. It is accompanied by a soundtrack of speakers relaying a fantastical narrative of environmental pollution and land reclamation on a mysterious planet. The film “Bending to Earth” (2015) is further investigation into inscriptions and transformation of society, manifested in the landscape. Several radioactive fields are circled by a handcamera from a helicopter while a recorded voice over which appears through several often distorted world radio stations is describing the materials of those constructions and offers a mediation of order-systems and landscape archives. “It is a whole language, a kind of alphabet of an image engineered in the earth. I am an observer of this document, I suppose I am interested in what a document is, how it relates to reality. In some sense, there is this relation to the document, not just as a preexistent form but as a potential or imagined object – the part that remains behind or the break within the narrative”. In this digital age Rosa Barba further develops the analogue film, approaching sculpture and installation.
Info: Malmö Konsthall, S:t Johannesgatan 7, Malmö, Duration: 18/2-14/5/17, Days & Hours: Mon-tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, Wed 11:00-21:00, www.konsthall.malmo.se
