Rosa Barba
01 May - 20 Jun 2015
ROSA BARBA
Inside a Magnified Picture
1 May - 20 June 2015
Meyer Riegger is pleased to present Inside a Magnified Picture, the first solo exhibition in the gallery of the Italian-German artist Rosa Barba.
The work of Rosa Barba is based on radical experimentation with the medium of film, proposing a new language. Her pieces not only dissect cinema itself (celluloid, light, colour, sound, image, movement, time) but also fragment narration into different layers, implying a level of abstraction in which imagination and a conceptual approach play a decisive role.
The exhibition results from the desire to radically empty the gallery and transform it into an engine room.
In this apparently empty backstage, a number of elements stand out: a light beam and sound, the physical space of the gallery with the moving body of the spectator and especially the window the film is projected onto, all become important elements in the construction and understanding of the work. The projected film is not just an image, but one constructed with an ensemble of elements.
Projecting the film onto the large window not only transforms the whole gallery space into a projection room, but also puts the gallery in relation to its exterior. The gallery wall becomes a membrane between inside and outside, private and public, I and world. This membrane, a surface of events, evokes the cinema screen but also a particular moment in the history of painting - the invention of perspective - in which, according to Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise Della Pittura, the picture plane should be treated as though it were made of transparent glass through which the visual rays pass. Later he refers to the picture plane as an open window.
Time as Perspective (2012) is the film projected onto this membrane of the building. Shown for the first time in Germany, the film, shot in the desert landscape of Texas, revealing continuous scenery of rhythmically pumping oil derricks in which Barba explores the idea of a geological time. For the artist, time is as ‘a layered slab, with periods stacked on top of each other, more than as a single stretched line.’ The oil pumps are in an infinite looping movement which draws a parallel to the loop of the film itself. A double loop of sorts. They are also reminiscent of clocks or sewing machines. These mechanic devices that transform the landscape into a drawing field remind us of Rosa Barba’s own filmic sculptures, which transform themselves into drawing machines.
Concurrently, the concept of timeless is also central to the film. There is no clear dating of the film and one is left to wonder if this is a vision from the past or a foresight of the future, which is also underlined by the film’s political dimension. For Barba, this vision of time is an instrument for the way in which she thinks about film as film.
In this work, one reads ‘time is the result of an imperfect perception of reality’. This play with the perception of reality is central to Rosa Barba’s work: she proposes a parallel and alternative way of looking at things, where boundaries are no longer defined.
Also on view in the showroom is the filmic sculpture Enterprise of Notations (2013) in which several spheres are transported on a rail by a perforated film while being projected simultaneously. The process alludes to early forms of telecommunication or the punch cards of early music transcripts.
Through her installations, Rosa Barba continues her exploration of film and its capacity to be simultaneously an immaterial medium that carries information, and a physical material with sculptural properties. The category of film is expanded and abstracted beyond the literal components of the celluloid strip, the projector through which it passes, and the image projected onto a screen. Each component becomes a starting point for artworks that expand on the idea of film as well as exploring its intrinsic attributes.
The Conductor (2014) on view at the showroom as well is a silicone, ball-shaped object another membrane but transmitting sound in intervals by transforming its shape. This work is an enigmatic companion of her large-scale water installation La Fosse d’Orchestre (2013).
The newest work, Isolation of Information (2015), is a large roll of an entire set of typographic letters that Rosa Barba inherited from a press that used it for forty years to publish Italian literature. It is now cast in a heavy wax block. This work is a continuation of the process started with the work Recorded Expansions of Infinite Things (2012), first shown at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2012. It is a rolled language landscape containing the record of thousands of metal letterpress blocks, each an individual letter or piece of punctuation. They vary in size, occupying space differently, and seem to be organized into some kind of visual logic, rather than an alphabetic or linguistic one.
The typeface is extremely particular, suggesting a specific period of Modernist design as well as a sense of place; maybe even a kind of knowledge or politics.
Rosa Barba’s new film Bending to Earth (2015) will be previewed at this years Venice Biennale
All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor starting on May 9.
Filipa Oliveira
Inside a Magnified Picture
1 May - 20 June 2015
Meyer Riegger is pleased to present Inside a Magnified Picture, the first solo exhibition in the gallery of the Italian-German artist Rosa Barba.
The work of Rosa Barba is based on radical experimentation with the medium of film, proposing a new language. Her pieces not only dissect cinema itself (celluloid, light, colour, sound, image, movement, time) but also fragment narration into different layers, implying a level of abstraction in which imagination and a conceptual approach play a decisive role.
The exhibition results from the desire to radically empty the gallery and transform it into an engine room.
In this apparently empty backstage, a number of elements stand out: a light beam and sound, the physical space of the gallery with the moving body of the spectator and especially the window the film is projected onto, all become important elements in the construction and understanding of the work. The projected film is not just an image, but one constructed with an ensemble of elements.
Projecting the film onto the large window not only transforms the whole gallery space into a projection room, but also puts the gallery in relation to its exterior. The gallery wall becomes a membrane between inside and outside, private and public, I and world. This membrane, a surface of events, evokes the cinema screen but also a particular moment in the history of painting - the invention of perspective - in which, according to Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise Della Pittura, the picture plane should be treated as though it were made of transparent glass through which the visual rays pass. Later he refers to the picture plane as an open window.
Time as Perspective (2012) is the film projected onto this membrane of the building. Shown for the first time in Germany, the film, shot in the desert landscape of Texas, revealing continuous scenery of rhythmically pumping oil derricks in which Barba explores the idea of a geological time. For the artist, time is as ‘a layered slab, with periods stacked on top of each other, more than as a single stretched line.’ The oil pumps are in an infinite looping movement which draws a parallel to the loop of the film itself. A double loop of sorts. They are also reminiscent of clocks or sewing machines. These mechanic devices that transform the landscape into a drawing field remind us of Rosa Barba’s own filmic sculptures, which transform themselves into drawing machines.
Concurrently, the concept of timeless is also central to the film. There is no clear dating of the film and one is left to wonder if this is a vision from the past or a foresight of the future, which is also underlined by the film’s political dimension. For Barba, this vision of time is an instrument for the way in which she thinks about film as film.
In this work, one reads ‘time is the result of an imperfect perception of reality’. This play with the perception of reality is central to Rosa Barba’s work: she proposes a parallel and alternative way of looking at things, where boundaries are no longer defined.
Also on view in the showroom is the filmic sculpture Enterprise of Notations (2013) in which several spheres are transported on a rail by a perforated film while being projected simultaneously. The process alludes to early forms of telecommunication or the punch cards of early music transcripts.
Through her installations, Rosa Barba continues her exploration of film and its capacity to be simultaneously an immaterial medium that carries information, and a physical material with sculptural properties. The category of film is expanded and abstracted beyond the literal components of the celluloid strip, the projector through which it passes, and the image projected onto a screen. Each component becomes a starting point for artworks that expand on the idea of film as well as exploring its intrinsic attributes.
The Conductor (2014) on view at the showroom as well is a silicone, ball-shaped object another membrane but transmitting sound in intervals by transforming its shape. This work is an enigmatic companion of her large-scale water installation La Fosse d’Orchestre (2013).
The newest work, Isolation of Information (2015), is a large roll of an entire set of typographic letters that Rosa Barba inherited from a press that used it for forty years to publish Italian literature. It is now cast in a heavy wax block. This work is a continuation of the process started with the work Recorded Expansions of Infinite Things (2012), first shown at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2012. It is a rolled language landscape containing the record of thousands of metal letterpress blocks, each an individual letter or piece of punctuation. They vary in size, occupying space differently, and seem to be organized into some kind of visual logic, rather than an alphabetic or linguistic one.
The typeface is extremely particular, suggesting a specific period of Modernist design as well as a sense of place; maybe even a kind of knowledge or politics.
Rosa Barba’s new film Bending to Earth (2015) will be previewed at this years Venice Biennale
All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor starting on May 9.
Filipa Oliveira