Rosa Barba: Touched by the Same Breath of Air
Touched By The Same Breath Of Air, Rosa Barba’s (born 1972, Agrigento, Italy) first solo exhibition in Finland, features film and video installations, and sculptures. The central piece of the exhibition is the Blind Volumes (2016) installation, which fills the entire WAM sculpture hall.
Rosa Barba combines immateriality with materiality in her works. Regardless of the immaterial nature, they emphasise spatiality and a powerful physical presence. Barba studied originally film making, and she usually uses film, old film projectors and texts as material in her works. The themes of her works are found in archives, museum collections and archives, astronomy, architecture or landscape art. Her works discuss themes such as the relationship between people and their own environment and nature as well as how we classify things. The works often contain references to avant-garde films and speculative fiction.
Film is Barba’s primary medium, but she also works with installations and sculptures as well as books published alongside her works in addition to video and film. Barba emphasises film as a physical object and the meaning of analogue technology in the digital era.
Rosa Barba has held numerous private exhibitions around the world, and her works have been featured in many international overviews of contemporary art and festivals. Barba has won several prestigious art awards and participated in e.g. the Venice Biennale. Barba lives and works in Berlin.
The exhibition was curated by Jonni Saloluoma, Exhibitions Curator at Museum Centre of Turku.
Photo: Ville Mäkilä, Museum Centre of Turku.