Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba (born 1972, Agrigento, Italy) is a Berlin-based visual artist. Barba is known for using the medium of celluloid and its materiality to create cinematic film installations, sculptures and publications. She exhibits in galleries and museums internationally.

Rosa Barba began at a young age to work with film as sculpture. She very soon began experimenting with moving images using super 8 film. From 1993 - 1995 she studied Theater and Film Studies in Erlangen, Germany. During her studies at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (1995–2000) she made her first 16 mm film Panzano] (2000) in which three characters struggle to assign parts among themselves.

Barba has travelled and taken part in several residencies; the two-year residency program at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2003-2004), Production in Residence, Baltic Arts Center Visby (2006), Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, USA (2006), IASPIS Stockholm (2007-2008) and Artists-in-Residence-Programm der Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

Many of her works have been sold at auction, including 'PARACHUTABLE' sold at Sotheby's Amsterdam 'Global Contemporary, Rijkakademie' in 2010 for $11,654.

She is part of a group of artists that addresses the importance of film and analogue in the digital age along with other contemporary practitioners such as Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Luke Fowler, Ben Rivers etc.

Barba lives and works in Berlin.

There have been several articles about Rosa Barba, including 'Art and politics: the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo taps into current sentiments in Brazil' written by Janelle Zara for Wallpaper in 2016.

Central to her conceptual sculptures is bringing projected images, verbal memories, physical, and imagined objects into a non-compliant yet coherent dialogue. They are speculations on the nature of documents as contemporary reflections not as finished products. Yet Barba is interested in not merely only translating the document into art but rather continuously goes back and forth from material to image and image to material. Thus content becomes form and form becomes content.

...
Wikipedia