Esther Schipper is pleased to present They Are Taking All My Letters, a presentation by Rosa Barba, who has had two solo exhibitions with the gallery. On view will be a new kinetic sculptural work using celluloid and a work cast in steel.
Rosa Barba’s practice merges films, sculptures, installations, live performances, text pieces, and publications that are grounded in the material and conceptual qualities of cinema. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging by inviting the viewers to participate in her cultural observations.
A new wall-mounted kinetic sculpture, They Are Taking All My Letters, 2025 features 34 vertical strips of 70mm celluloid film that move across its rectangular surface, lit from the back. The 34 lines are in constant motion as a sequence of words in white printed letters on a black background scroll up and down. The fragments draw on texts by the American poets Susan Howe, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, as well as on the artist’s own writings. The excerpts are held together conceptually by themes of time, flickering light and language.
One challenge is in reading the texts: whether by moving one’s eye up or down a vertical loop or by jumping across the lines to observe a constant rearrangement, a new editing and orchestration is ever evolving and changing. The work creates an interesting temporal parallax by using a nearly obsolete medium such as celluloid film across the grain, so to speak: Not only does the work exclusively “depict” text, not images as such, but because it is not moving at the 24 frames per second that are at the root of film’s illusion of movement, the film is not strictly speaking cinematic. Instead, each thread moves at its own speed, turning the film into a vehicle for text, and just as with speech, each speaker has their own pace of expression.
Nearby, a sculptural work made from lead letters on steel, Language Infinity Sphere, 2018, further emphasizes the role of language and its dissolution in Barba’s work. The set of found letterpress characters, from a printer of literary texts, covers the steel sphere, creating a new printing tool. Yet, the sculpture breaks up any syntactical promise of language, as its fragments create a visual representation of characters, more landscape than text. The work is part of a series of sculptures and prints made with thousands of old metal letterpress blocks.
While the function of these letters has been overtaken by new methods of printing and distributing texts, their arrangement follows the logic of form rather than an alphabetical order—an encryption that formulates the instability of knowledge, or perhaps a lost or new language.
Solo exhibitions by Rosa Barba will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 2025 (including two weekends of performances), at MdbK, Leipzig in May 2025, MCA, Zagreb in September 2025 and at MAXXI, Rome in November 2025. A monograph on Rosa Barba’s work is forthcoming in 2025 as part of the Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series.
Rosa Barba was born in Agrigento, Italy. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Barba studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and has completed her PhD with the title On the Anarchic Organization of Cinematic Spaces: Evoking Spaces beyond Cinema at the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University in 2018, which was published by Hatje Cantz in 2022. She has been a visiting professor at MIT, ACT (Program in Art, Culture and Technology), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barba holds a professorship “Art in Space and Time” at the ETH Zürich.
Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Evoking a Space Beyond the Cinema, MALI Museum, Lima (2024); Rosa Barba: The Hidden Conference, The Tanks at Tate Modern, London (2023); Rosa Barba: Emanations, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Perth (2023); Rosa Barba: In a Perpetual Now, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021); Rosa Barba, Armory Park Avenue, New York (2019); Rosa Barba: Send Me Sky, Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2018); Rosa Barba: Solar Flux Recordings, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2017); Rosa Barba: From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017), and Rosa Barba: Spacelength Thought, Secession, Vienna (2017)
Among institutional collections that hold Barba’s work are: Centre Pompidou, Paris, Collezione MAXXI, Rome; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Bremen; Kunsthaus Zürich; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporanéo, Castilla y León; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Germany; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Staatliche Museen Berlin – Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Tate Modern, London; The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.
