19 Facts About Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba was born in 1972 in the town of Agrigento, on the Italian island of Sicily.

Rosa Barba started practicing photography before experimenting with moving images using super 8 film.

Rosa Barba continued her studies in film between 1995 and 2000 at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in Cologne, Germany.

Rosa Barba made her first 16mm film while at the academy, titled Panzano, in which three characters struggle to assign parts among themselves.

In 2018, Rosa Barba acquired her PhD at the Malmo Art Academy at Lund University, under the supervision of Sarat Maharaj, professor for Visual Arts and Knowledge Systems.

The various professional and educational experiences have brought Rosa Barba to teaching and she currently holds a Professorship in Art in Space and Time at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich.

Rosa Barba interrogates the industry of cinema and regards it in her work in an architectural sense and as an instrument, where the environment, the screen and the projection can be pushed forward to create another spatiotemporal dimension that is concurrent with and points beyond the context of interior or exterior space.

Rosa Barba has participated in the 52nd, 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale.

At the 56th Biennale All the World's Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor, Rosa Barba exhibited Bending to Earth.

Rosa Barba participated in the Liverpool Biennale in 2010, in the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Performa13, New York, the Beaufort Triennale, as well as in various festivals and other biennials.

Rosa Barba participated in the inaugural Malta Biennale in 2024.

Rosa Barba has been actively developing her practice through a number of international residencies, including the two-year residency program at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam ; Production-in-Residence program, Baltic Arts Center Visby ; Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, USA ; IASPIS Stockholm and the Artists-in-Residence-Programme of Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

At EMPAC, Rosa Barba was commissioned a new work production in collaboration with Rensselaer's Hirsch Observatory, which resulted in two site-specific installations spanning different media formats, The Color out of Space and White Museum.

At Callie's, Berlin, Rosa Barba developed Voice Engine, a performance installation which has been presented at Centre Pompidou in 2023 and Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 2024.

Rosa Barba's films develop from situations that form societies and landscapes.

Rosa Barba investigates environments and weaves stories of place and people into fictitious narratives that open up new possibilities for interpretation.

For example, in the film Outwardly from Earth's Center that was produced on the Swedish island Gotland during the winter of 2006 as a Production-in-Residence project for the Baltic Art Center in Sweden, Rosa Barba collaborated with the local inhabitants, who performed in the film, to create narratives and form characters as the filming progressed.

Rosa Barba worked with communities that are affected by glacier melting and its geological time becoming present today.

Since 2004 Rosa Barba has been publishing a series of printed editions parallel to her films as another form to express and dismantle the cinematic organism.