Former ACT Lecturer Rosa Barba Awarded $50,000 Calder Prize

Former ACT Lecturer, Rosa Barba, has been awarded the biennial Calder Prize. Jill Magid (SMVisS ’00) was the previous recipient in 2017.

Barba is an artist with a particular interest in film and the ways it articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form, and plasticity play an important role in the perception of her work. She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information and documents, taking them out of the context in which they are normally seen and reshaping and representing them anew. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in time. They often focus on natural landscapes and man-made interventions into the environment and probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty, more legible as reassuring myth than the unstable reality they represent.

She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide (including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Malmö Konsthall; CAPC Bordeaux; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA; MAXXI, Rome; Tate Modern, London) and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennials (including the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale). Her work is part of numerous international collections and has been widely published. Barba’s work has been awarded numerous prizes, such as the 46th International Prize for Contemporary Art, Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco (2015).

She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information and documents, taking them out of the context in which they are normally seen and reshaping and representing them anew.

Barba was also part of ACT’s Fall 2015 Lecture Series and had a solo exhibition, Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space, at the List Visual Arts Center from October 23, 2015 – January 3, 2016.

From ArtForum:
The Calder Foundation has awarded its biennial Calder Prize to Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba. In addition to receiving $50,000, Barba will have one of her works placed in a major public collection. She is the eighth artist to receive the Calder Prize. Previous laureates include Tara Donovan, Rachel Harrison, Jill Magid, Haroon Mirza, and Tomás Saraceno.

Born in Agrigento, Italy, in 1972, Barba often merges film, sculpture, installation, live performance, sound, and text to create fully immersive works. Much of her output takes the form of films, experimental documentaries, and fictional narratives that address various topics, including the natural landscape and man-made interventions in the environment, the historical record and personal memory, and the materiality of film itself.

“If conventional cinema aims for absorption and expanded cinema aims for estrangement, Barba rejects both, staging a confrontation between these two ways of approaching the film experience: She couples a phenomenological encounter with the apparatus and a commitment to film as a technology of the virtual, one able to serve as a portal to other places and other times,” Erika Balsom wrote in the September 2017 issue of Artforum.

In 2017, the foundation commissioned Barba to produce a cinematic “portrait” of one of Calder’s works for an ongoing series of films made by contemporary artists, curated by Vic Brooks. After visiting Calder’s studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, Barba homed in on an unpainted mobile from 1968 installed above one of Calder’s workstations and created the short film Enigmatic Whisper. Shot on 16mm film and accompanied by an original score, it premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Barba has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (2019); the Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2018); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2017); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017); and Secession, Vienna (2017). She has also participated in the Thirty-Second São Paulo Bienal (2016); the Fifty-Third and Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennales (2009 and 2015); and the Eighth Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014); among other international exhibitions.