Rosa Barba, born in 1972 in Agrigento, Italy, is a visual artist and filmmaker known for her use of the medium of film and its materiality to create cinematic installations, sculptures, and publications. She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Her work sits between various dichotomies: permanent and impermanent, real and imaginary, obsolete and modern, conceptual and concrete, alien and familiar. Her pieces range from films to sculptures, installations to live performances, as well as text and sound.
In recent years, Barba has been struck by the affinities between astronomy and cinema. In her view, both cinema and astronomy engage with the space of light, time, and the concept of distance. This interest is reflected in her works, such as Drawn by the Pulse, a silent 35mm kinetic sculpture that merges astronomical research with cinematic techniques.
In Language Infinity Sphere, the artist continues her semantic exploration of language, creating a fragmented text that is fixed on the canvas. This work represents a rebellion against the thinning out of contemporary language.
Her works have been exhibited in international galleries and museums, including MoMA in New York, MAXXI in Rome, MALI in Lima, Depot Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Tate Modern in London. Barba has received numerous accolades, including the Calder Prize in 2020 and the International Prize for Contemporary Art from the Prince Pierre Foundation of Monaco in 2015.

From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader [may – october 2017] Milano

Rosa Barba’s exhibition at HangarBicocca, titled From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader, was an exhibition project that brought together fourteen works by the artist created since 2009. Among these were 35mm and 16mm films, kinetic sculptures, and site-specific interventions. The exhibition created an intense dialogue between the works and the industrial environment of the exhibition space.
The five films presented, all previously unseen in Italy, included The Empirical Effect (2009), an exploration of the landscape of Mount Vesuvius, and two of Barba’s most recent works: Enigmatic Whisper (2017), filmed in the studio of artist Alexander Calder, and From Source to Poem (2016), a densely layered audiovisual narrative. The latter film was made at the audiovisual preservation center of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia, the largest multimedia archive in the world.
The exhibition offered a reflection on the poetic qualities of both natural and human landscapes, on places as archives of memory, and challenged the concept of linear time. Through her works, Barba explored reality as an invention, generated by the individual interpretation of real events, playing with the idea that each scene could happen in the future just as much as in the past.