We are happy to announce the first solo exhibition of our artist Rosa Barba at carlier | gebauer, opening at the Berlin Gallery Weekend 2011. With her filmic works and sculptures, which she exhibited widely in major institutions for contemporary art in Europe, Rosa Barba (born 1972 in Agrigent/Italy) has fundamentally recontextualized the discourse of celluloid-formats in the visual arts today. In her manifold techniques Barba challenges her own medium, the 16 mm and 35 mm film, as a historic innovation of modernism – and demonstrates, that his epoch, as much as the medium itself, remained incomplete, open for aesthetic, narrative and technical potentialities. The artist turns the celluloid into a contemporary and living medium, into an artistic field in which past and present are retranslated into one another.

At carlier | gebauer, Rosa Barba shows six works of the last two years, which demonstrate the wide angle of her artistic production. In her objects she identifies the narrations of historical cartographies, diagrammatic texts and demonstrates the ensnared operations of the projectors themselves. Barba’s works bring together views onto a medium in a state of disappearance and its radical presence. She investigates in the forms of the content and the contents of the forms, finds visual, temporal and spatial differences in that which hardly ever meets our everyday gaze, the undergrounds, the archives, deserts and landscapes. Barba’s works delineate a search, in which new starting points are demonstrated, news lives of things and people. She demonstrates a sculptural approach to society itself as a structure, which transforms what was unrelated into a relation. Barba demonstrates dispositions of the unrelated.