Rosa Barba’s Vision of Cinematic Anarchy

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 251, ‘Afterlife’

Rosa Barba’s practice is a luminous confluence of film and sculpture. By intertwining the two media, the artist moulds light as a Möbius strip that is at once image-making instrument and image, holding container and contained in interchangeable tension. Speaking to me while preparations are underway for her show, ‘The Ocean of One’s Pause’, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the artist describes her searching drive: ‘I’m always interested in breaking through architecture and questioning where’s the source and where’s the narrative. Is it inside or outside?’ As this insight suggests, her approach to cinema is spatially anarchic, crafted beyond the normative organization and demarcation of a screen to stretch the medium’s architectural, mechanical and photochemical capacities.

In her fidelity to filmic materiality, Barba’s works range in format but are exclusively shot on celluloid – as is the case for the exhibition’s newly commissioned 35mm piece Charge (2025), created in careful negotiation with the glassy verticality of the museum’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio. Throughout her practice, Barba has melded a sharp attention to the chemistry of cinema with the expanded coordinates of astronomy – a fitting companion in her investigations of time and light. For instance, Send Me Sky, Henrietta (2018) – recognizing the contributions of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a rare woman astronomer – translates a tribute to celestial calculus into a projected tableau of flickering illumination. More recent entries in Barba’s choreographic genealogy of light, such as Radiant Exposures – Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (2022) or Open Field Poem (2023), incorporate panels, mirrors and a heliostat as tools to orchestrate and channel sunlight. Both also cite the jazz artist Sun Ra, who supplies an Afrofuturist, fabulatory element in Barba’s intertextual system.

Her engagement with language often takes the form of a piecemeal composition, mirroring how she handles film through its component parts. Conceptually, Barba tells me, her method operationalizes a ‘fragmentation of cinema and the cinematic apparatus’. There is a playfulness to the resulting tinkering, staging dialogues between objects which expose and repurpose what might otherwise be the purely functional or conventionally shrouded aspects of film. Several of her installations feature prominently placed projectors, displayed as theatrical contraptions that are not only facilitators of the visual experience but participants in it.

Recalling a touch-sensitive plasma ball, Off Splintered Time (2021) materializes a delightful misappropriation of celluloid, using it as bright red plastic ribbon, woven around a circular glass structure to create what she calls a cinematic or filmic sculpture – the term which describes many of her works. Converging the musical, theatrical and mechanical aspects of her practice, Wirepiece (2022) involves a drum wire held taut so that a piece of film stock can act on it as a bow would upon a stringed instrument, producing a delicate, unexpected sound. Barba identifies this threaded assemblage as an antecedent to a similar component of the MoMA exhibition, creating another occasion for the at-once whimsical and technically driven innovation of using film to ‘play’ strings and wires.

Barba’s cinematic sculptures are constellations of uncertainty.

Such idiosyncratic sonic designs exemplify the haptic and performative qualities of her works, weaving in an exploration of embodiment. While musical features have been present throughout the 15 years covered in the show, and she will play the cello as part of its public programming, when I ask if she is a musician, Barba only concedes to the label obliquely. She does, however, definitively confirm that the quality of temporal pliability found in performance – the way it might create a stillness or circularity through repetition – pairs well with the ways her sculptural works defy conventional linearity. The timescape of Barba’s multifaceted experiments is an ouroboros, infinitely renewing the process of invention, driven by ceaseless curiosity. She describes to me ‘the idea of the loop: how you repeat something so often that then you unscrew something else and then you have to rethink the whole thing’.

Barba’s inscriptions of looping time are not only machinic and sculptural, but also topographical and ecological. She is keenly attuned to the cyclical clock of that which is ever-more-uneasily partitioned as ‘the natural world’, given how much of it has been tarnished and transformed by countless profit-driven industries. The place of ecology in her practice marks Barba’s orientation towards the relationality and interconnectedness of all things, moving between the cosmic and telluric to deftly probe micro-systems of machinery. Now based in Berlin, Barba makes kinetic geographies steered by her experiences of growing up travelling between the rural landscapes of southern Sicily and southern Germany, retaining a restless mobility in how she records her surroundings.

In Aggregate States of Matters (2019), a short film installation displayed at MoMA, she translates exchanges both amongst the Quechua, an Indigenous people in Peru, and between them and glaciers melting in the Andes – chronicling a dynamic, living interdependence that is both imperilled and rendered as adaptable through a formal palimpsest of speech and image. Over the arc of her career, Barba’s use of celluloid has touched on industrial considerations; the consequential extraction needed to acquire materials and how the transformations of accumulation, exhaustion, ruination and waste might collide with an enduring geological memory.

Archiving the remains of time, light, industrial matter and ecological elements is one way to think of Barba’s work. It is insistently material yet relies on architectures of immateriality, at times only marking relational geometries and the intervals between objects to suggest that even disappearance has a shape. Confounding presence and absence, endurance and ephemerality, her pliable inventories of duration use light as a tool for space-making guided by temporal circularity. Barba’s cinematic sculptures are constellations of uncertainty. In the face of a global terrain of belated historical reckonings and climate catastrophe, these luminous twists in time invite a mobile, imaginative re-evaluation of the past as it meets what can feel like eradication of the future .

This article first appeared in frieze issue 251 with the headline ‘The Remains of Time’

Rosa Barba’s ‘The Ocean of One’s Pause’ is on view at MoMA, New York, until 6 July

^{Main image: Rosa Barba, Aggregate States of Matters (detail), 2019, film still. Courtesy: © Rosa Barba}