ROSA BARBA's film installations at the Tate Modern

Rosa Barba was born in Italy in 1972. She lives and works in Berlin.

http://rosabarba.com/

Her works deal with the aleatory and psychic dimensions of the image, the speculative narration that conjures invisible landscapes, landscapes with unseen histories, and the characteristic evocation of cinematic narrative through the use of moving and projected text and sometimes an off-site reference to a historic event in Modernist discourse.

Barba explores the artisanal and the industrial processes fused together in cinema with the waywardness of her machines, while the 'cinematic mode of production' that brings these to bear on the attention and temporality of the viewer, is evoked on the small, diachronic and fictive scale of her archives and enigmas.

Rosa Barba's Work encompasses film, sculpture, installation and publications.

In this exhibition Barba's carefully choreographed installation divides viewers' attention between the projected image and the projector itself, posing questions as to which is the marrative and which is the narrator. The artist's distinctive use of light and sound permeates the gallery, resulting in a compelling, multi-sensory experience composed of a range of different objects, images, forms and surfaces.

In her films, Rosa Barba surveys unusual places or improbable situations, creating works that reflect both her social and cultural research and her interest in film as a medium and as a physical presence.

An encounter with a room of these works is a multisesory, spatial experience. The projectors occupy space in a highly choreographed manner, beaming light against various surfaces. Their mechanical buzz mixes with faint soundtracks of electronics, spoken world, melody and field recordings.

STATING THE REAL SUBLIME 2009

is an astonishing object, most strikingly in that it is a heavy piece of equipment suspended from the ceiling by the diaphanous loop of film that spins through its system, casting an anamorphic square of light that stretches across the floor and up the wall. The film it projects has no image, other than the dust scratches that breed on the surface of the celluloid, slowly accumulating over the course of the exhibition.

Barba's series of felt drape sculptures address the issue of instability even more emphatically. The drapes are suspended from the ceiling and gathered in a train on the floor. A bright spotlight illuminates the surface, casting a dark shadow onto the wall some distance behind, within which a stencilled text cut out from the drape can be discerned. The drape's materiality is highlighted by the spotlight that, simultaneously, negates its legibility: the text can only be read clearly on the wall. In this way, Barba makes the drape both screen and projector, a tautological object that defines itself by the presence and absence of light.