Rosa Barbara at Moma New York

Rosa Barba inaugurates on May 3 a solo exhibition at MoMA New York, titled The Ocean of One's Pause. For Rosa Barba, cinema “allows time and space to vibrate, collapse, overlap, and extend.” Barba’s conceptual explorations of cinema probe historical documents, personal narratives, and the sensory experience of celluloid, often documenting natural landscapes and human-caused environmental changes. This installation embraces 15 years of Barba’s work, featuring films, kinetic sculptures, and sounds. A recently commissioned work, Charge, forms the core of the installation and examines light as a source of ecological change and scientific innovation.

These works are accompanied by a series of performances conceived by Barba as an “exploded poem.” In each event, the sound frequencies of percussionist Chad Taylor, vocalist Alicia Hall Moran, and Rosa Barba herself will activate a symphony of images throughout the installation. For over 15 years, Rosa Barba has explored the boundaries between cinema, body, and human voice through immersive performances that fuse film, installations, music, and text. The Ocean of One’s Pause continues her use of audio as a means for image creation and material to shape space. “A film is a performer,” Barba declares. “By manipulating aspects of projector operation, I seek to introduce the relationship between the projected image and the mechanics of projection, setting up a series of stages… charged with electricity.” Rather than playing a supporting role to the moving image, in this work Barba places sound at the center of the scene, creating a live collaboration of light, voice, rhythm, and film that emphasizes the interdependence of each.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Barba curated a film selection including some drawn from MoMA’s collection. Carte Blanche: Rosa Barba presents avant-garde and experimental films and videos that have influenced her career. In these works, landscapes marked by extraction and urban expansion are dotted with radical possibilities, journeys of transformation traced through otherworldly realities, and language becomes a visual and physical material that can fragment, vibrate, or be launched into space. This series, spanning diverse genres and formats over nearly 70 years, outlines the contours of Barba’s unique practice through moving image works that inspired her conceptual approach to cinema.

The exhibition is organized by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance, with Gee Wesley, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance. The performances are produced by Kate Scherer, Senior Manager and Producer, with Jessie Gold, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.
Music arranged and performed by Rosa Barba (cello), Alicia Hall Moran (voice), and Chad Taylor (percussion). Audio engineering by Sascha von Oertzen.

On view on the 2nd floor, room 213, Rosa Barba’s film installation Aggregate States of Matter is exhibited in the museum’s collection. With this installation, the artist asks: How can a form of visual expression convey the environmental and social impact of such a thorny issue as climate change?
For this work, the artist interviewed members of the Quechua indigenous communities in Peru, who have had to adapt their daily practices due to the melting of a nearby glacier. Abandoning journalistic conventions such as voice-over narration, the artist weaves text and images of the country’s vast territory. In doing so, she questions the traditional nature-culture binary, engaging with philosophical, spiritual, and cultural approaches to environmental change and time simultaneously.
Through the technology employed, Barba also explores how cinema archives and transmits knowledge and information; her use of celluloid — an increasingly obsolete material that degrades with every pass through a projector — resonates with the fragility of cultural memory and the natural landscape.

The installation in the museum collection is organized by Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.

Rosa Barba (born in Agrigento, 1972. Lives and works in Berlin)
Rosa Barba’s artistic practice addresses various dichotomies, exploring themes of permanence versus impermanence, reality versus fiction, and the interaction between language and time. Through film, sculpture, installations, and performance, her research investigates how temporal and linguistic constructs shape space, challenging linear narratives and traditional semiotics. Barba deconstructs cinematic elements to examine the intersections of physical materials such as projectors and film reels with abstract concepts like time, space, and sound. Her work often focuses on natural landscapes and human interventions, blurring the boundaries between historical documentation, personal narrative, and artistic representation. Her work is part of numerous international collections, and her recent solo exhibitions include: MALI Museum, Lima, Peru (2024); Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam (2024); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); Tate Modern, London (2023); PICA, Perth, Australia (2023); Villa Medici, Rome (2022); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021–2022); and various Biennials, including the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale, São Paulo (2016), Sydney (2014), and Performa (2013). Barba received the Calder Prize in 2020 and the International Contemporary Art Prize from the Fondation Prince Pierre of Monaco in 2015.