The Remains of Time

Afterlife: Rosa Barba's ecological cinema comes off the screen

- Yasmina Price

ROSA BARBA'S PRACTICE is a luminous confluence of film and sculpture. By intertwining the two media, the artist moulds light as a Möbius strip that is at once image-making instrument and image, holding container and contained in interchangeable tension. Speaking to me while preparations are underway for her show, 'The Ocean of One's Pause', at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the artist describes her searching drive: 'I'm always inter-ested in breaking through architecture and questioning where's the source and where's the narrative.

Is it inside or outside?' As this insight suggests, her approach to cinema is spatially anarchic, crafted beyond the normative organization and demarcation of a screen to stretch the medium's architectural, mechanical and photochemical capacities.

In her fidelity to filmic materiality, Barba's works range in format but are exclusively shot on celluloid - as is the case for the exhibition's newly commissioned 35mm piece Charge (2025), created in careful negotiation with the glassy verticality of the museum's Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio.

Throughout her practice, Barba has melded a sharp attention to the chemistry of cinema with the expanded coordinates of astronomy - a fitting companion in her investigations of time and light. For instance, Send Me Sky, Henrietta (2018) - recognizing the contributions of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a rare woman astronomer - translates a tribute to celestial calculus into a projected tableau of flickering illumination.

More recent entries in Barba's choreographic genealogy of light, such as Radiant Exposures - Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (2022) or Open Field Poem (2023), incorporate panels, mirrors, and a heliostat as tools to orchestrate and channel sunlight. Both also cite the jazz artist Sun Ra, who supplies an Afrofuturist, fabulatory element in Barba's intertextual system.