Rosa Barba Time Machine

cm 145 x 250 x 5

Born in Sicily, but raised in Germany, Rosa Barba studied at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Her work begins with historical and social cultural research to propose accurate reflections on the present. The artist realizes video and film installations with a preference for 16 and 35 mm film, a technique in which she exploits all the plastic characteristics (of the machines, the light and the film). Her films unite documentary and imaginary aspects. Landscapes and history are privileged subjects but literary excerpts of writers, poets and scholars are also included. In her video installations, the video recorders often become part of the narration and the projectors play a leading role, transformed from technological instruments into actor-protagonists. These installations unhinge the concept of time, the linearity of the story and the process of cinematographic fruition itself. Rosa Barba realizes works – which she calls film sculptures – in which she focuses on the concept of time by making use of video loops and sculptural gestures. Her production often includes transformation processes: films become texts and texts become films, as in "Time Machine", based on the H. G. Wells science-fiction novel (The Time Machine, 1895). This work offers an additional contribution to Rosa Barba’s investigation of the cinematographic language and medium. The artist has impressed the text of Wells on the surface of a white canvas, illuminated by a spotlight that is also white, to transform the science-fiction novel into a script. In this way, the text is not subject to the cinematographic canons of time, space and perception. From 2004, the artist issues Printed Cinema, periodical publications linked to artistic projects with which Barba extends her reflections on cinematographic language confirming, with this endeavor, the centrality of the alternation between film and text, cinema and writing, in her work.

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C. Parisi, A. Viliani (eds.), Rosa Barba, White Is an Image, exhibition catalogue (île de Vassivière, Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière; Rovereto, Mart-Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto), Ostfildern 2011. S. Edelsztein et al., Rosa Barba: In Conversation With, Milan 2011; Rosa Barba: Time as perspective, exhibition catalogue (Zurich, Kunsthaus), Ostfildern 2013.

Foto Matteo Monti

Donation by the artist

Installation