Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space

Over the last ten years, Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba (b. 1972, Agrigento, Italy) has created a singular body of work that encompasses films, sculptures, and text-based pieces. Barba’s projects oscillate in scale as they explore the material qualities of celluloid film, the relationship between tangible and imagined objects, and the ways in which film articulates space. In her smaller sculptures, influenced by what is known as structural film, she examines the physical properties of the film projector, celluloid, and projected light. Her longer films, by contrast, are speculative stories combining experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are often situated indeterminately in the past, present, or future.

Several of Barba’s signature themes and motifs run throughout this exhibition, including her ongoing consideration of time. The large 35mm projection Time As Perspective (2012) mounted in the center of the gallery, was filmed in West Texas and partly inspired by the desert’s “timelessness.” In overhead shots of oil fields and continuously moving pumpjacks, Barba suggests the passing of time and hints at the waning of an industrial age. Her concern with “deep” geological time and the impossibility of grasping its immensity is carried forward in her most recent work, The Color Out of Space (2015), a filmic sculpture shown here for the first time. Images of stars and planets collected over the last two years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, are accompanied by the voices of scientists, writers, and artists who reflect on the tiny part of the universe that is known to us, and by extension on the limitations of human perspective and the malleability of time and space.

Public programs
October 19, 7pm
MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT)
Monday night lecture series
"Rosa Barba: On Objects as Ideas"

Rosa Barba’s lecture will be moderated by Björn Sparrman (ACT), with response from Haseeb Ahmed (MIT ACT ’10 / Zurich University of the Arts / University of Antwerp) and Henriette Huldisch (MIT LIST)

November 5, 6pm
Curator's tour

December 3, 6:30pm
Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture Series
"Surface Tension, Screen Space": A talk by Giuliana Bruno, Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

All public programs are free and open to the general public. All are welcome.

Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Consulate General of Italy in Boston, Goethe-Institut Boston, as well as the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and many generous individual donors.