Rosa Barba: Stating The Real Sublime

Gio Marconi Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo show with Rosa Barba 'Stating the Real Sublime'. On display on the gallery’s groundfloor will be several films, sculptures, installations as well as her new lightboxes. The trilogy 'Western Round Table', 'They Shine' and 'Waiting Grounds' all share the geographical starting point of the Mojave Desert in California: In “They Shine”, an impressive 35mm projection that could already be seen at the T2 Torino Triennale in 2008, the metal panels of a solar power station reflect the sunlight while a male voice in the background is imagining a futuristic city which is totally independent of the outside world thanks to the power station’s energy resources. “Western Round Table”, whose title refers to a conference that took place in 1949 and at which representatives from art, literature, music and science (among them Marcel Duchamp and Frank Lloyd Wright) discussed contemporary art and its possibile future, is a sculpture consisting of two 16mm projectors that have their spotlights aimed at one another as if in a dialogue. In 'Machine Vision Seekers' a slowly moving projector casts text fragments of a fictional script onto the surrounding walls. The projected words that seem like subtitles of a movie or incoherent lines of a film script therewith create a kind of imageless cinema. One of the new sculptures, 'The Enigmatic Whistler', is a 16mm projector that is slowly being embraced by its own material, the film. Two lightboxes that are hung on opposing walls in a room, and of which each depicts a part of a film script on a cloth of punched out felt that is lit from behind, are communicating with eachother and thereby completing the exhibition. Barba’s deconstructed projector choir 'Coro Spezzato: The Future lasts one Day', an installation consisting of five 16mm projectors that cast fragments of sentences about a new collective future onto the surrounding walls, is another of Barba’s sculpture – performances and can still be seen at the 53rd Venice Biennale.