ROSA BARBA: DRAWING VOCABULARIES

A striking installation by Rosa Barba (Italy, 1972), comprising around 25 works — some of them previously unseen — will take over the CAM Nave from 16 May. At the same time, on the Mezzanine overlooking the Nave, works from the CAM Collection selected by the artist will extend and reflect her creative process. Rosa Barba is the third artist to be given completefreedom to work in the Nave and to choose works from the CAM Collection.

Curated by Benjamin Weil, the exhibition functions as a three-dimensional film and, at the same time, as a musical score — one in which cinema allows time and space to vibrate, collapse, overlap and expand. For more than twenty years, Rosa Barba has created large-scale, site-specific installations in which she uses celluloid film and cinematic apparatus to producemoving images that are also, in themselves, sculptural objects.

Visitors will encounter a dense, fragmented space transformed by the combination of projected images, sound, light and objects, and will be invited to follow a narrative they would normally expect to experience seated before a screen.

The time-based narrative revisits and deepens several conceptual threads that the artist has been exploring. Her work often addresses the juxtaposition of natural landscapes with human-induced environmental change, archival histories and visions of the future, affinities between astronomy and cinema, and the use of non-actors as witnesses. At the core of this approachlies an ongoing reflection on impermanence — of materials, of images, and of thought itself.

The title Drawing Vocabularies suggests open-ended, unstable processes. It evokes sustained explorations of liminal spaces and the flexibility inherent in reorganising space, deconstructing the cinematic apparatus and the filmic environment to reveal spaces beyondcinema. It celebrates attentiveness and elasticity, presenting a vibrant kinetic environment that continually reorganises and reactivates its own structures.

Rosa Barba will present a major monographic exhibition and a new performance at the Barbican in London in 2027. The performance will be produced in partnership with CAM.

Two new productions at the heart of the exhibition

A key strand of Rosa Barba’s artistic practice is her interest in archives and museum collections, particularly in storage spaces, where works from different periods coexist outside the logic of traditional display and where fact and fiction meet, fostering new narratives and hidden dialogues. On the one hand, the artist works with material elements (celluloid, projectors, light, sound); on the other, she incorporates immaterial ones — thereby reformulating truth and fiction, myth and reality, metaphor and materiality — to create a semi-fictional space within the physicality of the CAM Nave.

Two new productions lie at the heart of this exhibition: Myth and Mercury (2025) and Thick Harmonies (2026).

Myth and Mercury is a 35mm film co-commissioned by CAM and MAXXI, Rome, and co-produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.  In this work, intergalactic particles — or grains — encounter the fireworks of a community, whose explosions produce momentary flashes in the night sky. The piece incorporates excerpts from Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings, evoking the memories of this revolutionary thinker as he approached death, alongside images of the planet’s inner workings — seething terrains and volcanic landscapes. Adopting a slow rhythm, the film’s narratives span millions of years, myths, stellar imagery, high-tech machinery and lived realities.

The other production, Thick Harmonies, is a kinetic sculpture that establishes a dialogue between the seemingly opposing concepts of perpetual recurrence and impermanence. A 35mm film loop rotates irregularly upon itself, generating a constantly shifting composition of colour and rhythm — at once infinite and inherently unstable.

For the Mezzanine space, Barba has selected works from the CAM Collection in which, as in her own practice, text plays a fundamental role. The exhibition creates a literary structure in constant reconfiguration, as words are reassociated according to their arrangement on screens, in prints or within the space.

Across these two simultaneous exhibitions, Rosa Barba’s ongoing interest in reshaping the foundations and narratives of cinema in real time is evident in her analysis and appropriation of industrial cinema as an object, articulated through different forms of ‘staging’.

On the occasion of this exhibition, a publication titled Rosa Barba, Impermanence in Fields will be released. It explores the artist’s conceptual practice and brings together contributions from around twenty authors, among them Sarat Maharaj, Felicity D. Scott, Josiah McElheny, Monica Narula, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael T. Taussig, Corinne Diserens, Alessandro Rabottini, Georgia Horn, Zoe Leonard & Rosa Barba, Joachim Jäger, José-Carlos Mariátegui, Emily Watlington, Siegfried Zielinski, Benjamin Weil, Jonathan Pouthier, Francesco Stocchi, Mike Sperlinger and David Grubbs.

Edited by Hatje Cantz, the Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre (CAM), MAXXI (Rome) and Proyecto AMIL (Lima), the book serves as both a critical document on Barba’s work and an artist’s book in its own right. Bringing together a range of voices, it reflects on central themes in her practice — time, memory, language, cinema and the materiality of film. Through different formats, registers and approaches, the volume maps the intellectual terrain that surrounds and informs the artist’s performances, films and exhibitions, revealing the multiple narratives and speculative visions that drive her work.

Rosa Barba

An Italian artist based in Berlin, her work is held in numerous international collections and has been presented at leading institutions such as MAXXI (Rome, 2025), MoMA (New York, 2024, 2025), the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum (Rotterdam, 2024), MALI (Lima, 2024), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2023), Tate Modern (London, 2023), among others, as well as at biennials, including the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennale and Sydney Biennale. She has received the Zürich Art Prize (2026), the Calder Prize (2020) and the Prince Pierre Foundation's International Contemporary Art Prize (2015).