Rosa Barba | On Objects as Ideas

Through her installations, Rosa Barba continues her exploration of film and its capacity to simultaneously be 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. Projectors mutate into new mechanical objects that generate information in real time, they turn on themselves and bend the conventions of cinema to the requirements, possibilities, or limitations of their new forms.

Rosa Barba’s work engages questions of time– like inscriptions
in landscapes and language, and cuts across history and subject matter. She is especially interested in abstracting the cinematographic medium to push its limits and possibilities. Barba studied at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.

Rosa Barba’s lecture will be moderated by Björn Sparrman (ACT), with response from Haseeb Ahmed (MIT ACT ’10 / Zurich University of the Arts / University of Antwerp) and Henriette Huldisch (MIT LIST).

Rosa Barba’s talk on October 19 is co-organized by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.  Huldisch curated Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space which opens October 22, 2015.

ACT’s Monday night lecture series is conceived by Gediminas Urbonas, ACT director, and coordinated by Amanda Moore, ACT alumna ‘11, in conversation with ACT graduate students.