Rosa Barba: Meaning Distances

Rosa Barba's exhibition Meaning Distances opens this year's 25 FPS Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, bringing together a selection of sculptural film works. Barba’s conceptual explorations of film probe historical records, personal narratives, and the sensory experience of cinema and sound, often by recording natural landscapes and human-made changes to the environment. Landscape acts here as a pivotal actor in relation to transforming socio-political, cultural and architectural situations. Using performative framing as a strategic device, her films question the instability of knowledge, explore myths, and scientific experiments.  

Artist Rosa Barba explores permanence, impermanence, reality, and fiction through a repertoire of works traversing sculpture, installation, and film. Using performance as a framework and method, Barba examines the unruliness of cinematic apparatuses, the instability of knowledge, and the complexity of astronomical phenomena. Her work examines how space is influenced by temporal and linguistic constructs, challenging traditional understandings of narrative and language. Natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment feature as pivotal actors in Barba's films, and as proxies for charting political and cultural transformations in society. Using the raw material of cinema–projectors, screens, and celluloid film–Barba probes theoretical and abstract conditions of space and time, creating pieces that often quantify the convergence of light and sound. Her work is part of numerous international collections and recent solo exhibitions include: MoMA, New York (2025), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023), Tate Modern, London (2023), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021-2022), HangarBicocca, Milan (2017), Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2017) and Secession, Vienna (2017), Schirn Kunsthalle (2016), and at Biennials such as the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale, and Performa (2013).  

Author: Rosa Barba

Curators: Morana Matković (MSU), Nika Petković (25 FPS)

Organizers: MSU, 25 FPS

Production: Morana Matković (MSU), 25 FPS, Studio Rosa Barba

Technical exhibition setup:
Aleksandar Milošević (MSU)
Filip Zima (MSU)
Ivan Tudek (MSU)
Nenad Lalović (MSU)
Dalibor Cicvara (MSU)
Jason Mulhausen

Merten Houfek

Visual identity and graphic design: Andro Giunio

Exhibition text: Nika Petković (25 FPS)

Translation: Tanja Manabe

Installation photography: Damir Žižić

Communication and PR: Morana Matković (MSU), Ivan Salečić (MSU), Nika Petković (25 FPS)

Full festival program is available at: www.25fps.hr/en