Rosa Barba: Frame Time Open

MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts presents Frame Time Open, the most comprehensive solo exhibition ever held in Italy dedicated to Rosa Barba, one of the country’s most internationally acclaimed and influential contemporary artists.

Curated by Francesco Stocchi, the exhibition is open to the public from November 26, 2025 to March 8, 2026. It highlights over twenty years of the artist’s research through a selection of her most significant sculptural works and films, including two new productions created specifically for this project and premiering at MAXXI.

With Frame Time Open—developed in close collaboration with the artist, who also conceived the exhibition design—MAXXI’s spaces transform into an architectural notation of rhythmic interconnections through film, language, sound and light.

Rosa Barba’s research, positioned between cinema, literature, and science, explores time as both a physical and conceptual material.

The exhibition at MAXXI offers a comprehensive overview of her continuously evolving artistic methodology. It reaffirms her position as a pioneering figure in contemporary visual art, celebrating her distinctive approach to time—in her words: “considered as an accumulation of events rather than a linear progression—and to cinema as a spatial and temporal dimension.”

The exhibition layout, designed by Barba in response to Zaha Hadid’s spaces, is conceived as a three-dimensional score, an artwork displayed on intertwined tracks which extends like a drawing across Galleria 2 and responds sensitively to the architecture, making the exhibition a unique and site-specific experience.

A large steel and plexiglass framework presents 24 works created between 2009 and 2025, arranged along an open route with three distinct access points.

Cinematic elements become autonomous fragments that also emphasize the interdependency of each. Time unfolds in a circular flow of light, rhythm, and transparency, while sound amplifies the exhibition’s synesthetic dimension.

In the exhibition, works such as As Fixed in Flux (2025) and Solar Flux Recordings (2022) reveal time as a sculptural material, while Stating the Real Sublime (2009) and A Shark Well Governed (2017) play with conceptual ideas.

Color Clocks (2012) and Color Studies (2013) explore colour as a measure of perception; Hear, There, Where the Echoes Are (2016/2025) activates the whole exhibition through sound interference and Off Splintered Time (2021) transforms film into continuous movement.

At the heart of the project are two new productions.

Myth and Mercury (2025) is a new 35mm film co-commissioned by MAXXI and CAM—Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian and co-produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and Hamburger Kunsthalle. On one hand, intergalactic particles or grains meeting a community’s fireworks—the explosions’ lights–momentary glows against the night sky. On the other hand, extracts from Gramsci’s life in prison, memories of a revolutionary thinker as he approaches death, alongside the inner workings of the planet, bubbling scenes, and volcanic land. While the film’s pace is slow, its stories carry millions of years, myths, stellar imagery, high-tech machinery, and also realities of life, especially in Sicily. Myth and Mercury’s ending segment offering a vision of scientific futures almost comes at a sudden. Ultra-high energy neutrino detected in the Mediterranean, it has been declared. Records have been broken. Pulverised, even.

They Are Taking All My Letters (2025) is a kinetic sculpture composed of steel, acrylic, aluminium, LEDs, motors, and 34 vertical strips of 70mm celluloid film in constant motion, printed with white text on a black background drawn from writings by Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and the artist herself. The continuously shifting phrases generate ever-new linguistic combinations, reflecting on time, intermittent light, and the translation of language into image.

The exhibition at MAXXI inaugurates an international project that will unfold in a new site specific exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (May 2026).