In her exhibition In a Perpetual Now, Rosa Barba fills the modernist spaces of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin with sculptures, films and projectors deployed on an architectonic structure (Blind Volumes / Backstein, 2021) modelled after Mies van der Rohe’s plans for his unrealized Brick Country House project (1924). Creating a maze of lines and surfaces around the gallery, this streamlined metal form sets the stage—one architecture encapsulated in another—for the artist’s activation of a polyphonic composition in which all the elements—films, sculptures, modified projectors, screens—ultimately interact with each other.
Titled Instruments Inside Out, the audio recording of the exhibition creates an archive of the works but also of the performance of the machines and their location in the space throughout the exhibition period. From this fluctuating experience, which is reconstituted each time you listen to it, the soundtrack reenacts the framework of perception by offering another viewpoint on the composition as a whole. Translated into the spiralling grooves of a record album, the exhibition now unfolds its path from its periphery to its center.
Rosa Barba (b. 1972 in Agrigento / Italy, lives in Berlin), studied theater and film studies in Erlangen and attended the Academy of Media Arts Cologne as well as the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions (selection): Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2022); Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku / Finland (2020); Arter, Istanbul (2019, 2012); Kunsthalle Bremen (2018), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2017, 2010); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2016); Albertinum, Dresden (2015); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge/Mass. (2015); Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2014); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León (2013); Kunsthaus Zurich (2012); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010).
