Rosa Barba
Born in 1972 in Agrigente, Italy.
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Rosa Barba studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne followed by a fellowship at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. She completed her PhD with the title "On the Anarchic Organisation of Cinematic Spaces: Evoking Spaces beyond Cinema" at the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University in 2018.
The artist has been awarded various prizes, such as the 46th PIAC, International Prize for Contemporary Art, of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2015 and the Calder Prize in 2020. Rosa Barba has held residencies at the Atelier Calder, France; Baltic Art Center, Visby, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Iaspis, Stockholm, and Artpace, San Antonio, among others.
Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyze the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.
Her work is held in the collections of CAPC – Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; CNAP, Paris; Collezione MAXXI, Rome; Collezione FRAC Piemonte, Vercelli; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Fundación Tantica, Buenos Aires; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; GAM – Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Turin; FMAC, Geneva; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; André Iten Collection, Geneva; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Bremen; Kunsthaus Zürich; Lemaître Collection, London; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Mart – Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Museo del Novecento, Milan; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporanéo, Castilla y León; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Nomas Foundation, Rome; Pace Foundation, San Antonio; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Germany; Staatliche Museen Berlin – Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; UniCredit Art Collection, Milan; UniCredit Art Collection, Rovereto; Vehbi Koc Foundation, Istanbul; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
