Cinema is a tool for Rosa Barba, to create new possibilities of experience out there. For the reopening of the New National Gallery in Berlin, she is showing her central works as well as a work specially conceived for the exhibition. CultureNews spoke to the artist.
Rosa Barba, in your work, film is inseparable from physical and physical space, and the medium is becoming more and more digital. What does the haptic approach to film mean to you?
Rosa Barba: Over the years when I was producing film-based work, new technologies developed and with them came constant intensification. The atmosphere became more and more cinematic, with each new technology leaving less and less room for people to build the world around them. In the end there was no more gap, everything was settled and visible to us. People found tools and techniques to create more images with greater ease, but ironically, the options or possibilities are limited. The experience of various possible alternatives to spaces of ambiguity is taken away from the thinker, thereby shutting down cognitive possibilities and desires.
These different approaches to space – and form – are therefore at the heart of my work, which follows a conceptual approach that considers cinema in an architectural sense, but also as a tool. Here, the environment, screen and projection can be combined or enhanced to form a distinct spatio-temporal dimension that goes with and beyond the context of the interior or exterior space. There is uncertainty and speculation in this expanding space.
My response to that was to intensify my strategies of fragmentation by dismantling the status quo of cinema and focusing on some of the opportunities that arise from playing with its components: turning them inside out, turning them inside out, and incorporating them. do and redistribute them until they open new spaces.
The new National Gallery will reopen with your art. What triggered this invitation in you and how do you view the event?
Barba: It was a wonderful invitation from Joachim Jger almost 2.5 years ago to exhibit in one of my favorite museums and I am so glad that the Niue Nationalgalerie will finally reopen its doors and re-energize Berlin . It is an honor for me to be able to help shape the beginning of my work.
With your upcoming exhibition “In a Perpetual Now” you will embrace the architecture of the New National Gallery. How do your film/sculptural works relate to the Mies van der Rohe building and what is particularly important to you?
Barba: In my upcoming exhibition “In a Perpetual Now” for the reopening of the New Nationalgalerie in Berlin, I placed a sculpture of a surrealist building by Mies van der Rohe in the room as a blueprint containing many of my works from 2009 included and now. In this context, architecture is not just a three-dimensional space, but a temporal process that is constantly updated, built into the movement and perception of the subjects and thus itself remains mobile. Even more: Architecture must create spaces for unexpected resonance between the designing subject and social communities (bodies in motion) and their living environments.
Avant-garde abstract film and Mies’ architectural work can be seen as mutual sources of inspiration within a network of relationships between architects, intellectuals and the artistic avant-garde. (Was a board member for Mies magazine: “League for Independent Film”) I deal with van der Rohe’s cinematic perspective. With the sequential composition of forms in architecture and with conceptual influence in abstract film which also marked the path of the Bauhaus movement.
13. August 2021 // Janka Bertzlaff
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