EVOKING A SPACE BEYOND CINEMA: ROSA BARBA IN PERU

The exhibition features Aggregate States of Matters (2019), a film shot in the Peruvian Andes with the support of proyectoamil, in addition to a selection of her recent work. 

In 2002, Rosa Barba had one of her first exhibitions at the Sala Luis Miro-Quesada Garland in Miraflores (Lima) which started her enduring connection with Peru. During that visit Barba travelled extensively throughout the country, and in 2018 she visited the country again to study and film the communities and territories affected by the melting glaciers of the Andes. Her aerial filming of the Peruvian mountains and deserts acts as a way to read the landscape creating a tapestry that tells a story outside the constraints of linear progression.

In 2019, she produced Aggregate States of Matters, a 35mm film shot in the Andes which deals with the increasing impact of climate change on remote areas. At its core, the film pivots on the ambivalent negotiation between the binary idea of nature and culture, oscillating within the contemporary discourse on the environment, and its complex layers based on scientific, philosophical, spiritual and cultural approaches. For Aggregate States of Matters, Barba worked with communities that are affected by glacier melting and its geological time becoming present today. In a cautious, yet scrutinized exploration, the film illustrates blurring and melding boundaries between human and non-human actors. While the indigenous population profits from the benefits and wealth of farming, which rapidly increase due to changing environmental conditions, they concurrently face fast-moving challenges in their spiritual and cultural lives. 

As with other films by the artist, the work situates the notion of the landscape within a broader cultural context to remind us of how the complex human interventions in the environment impact our world, and hence shifts our perspective on history.  

The exhibition also includes a selection of her recent films and installations: Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021), The Long Poem Manipulates Spatial Organizations (2014), Radiant Exposures—Facts Run on Light Beams These Days (2022) and Weavers (2021).  On the occasion of the exhibition, Printed Cinema #23 will be presented, a new edition of her publication series which, since 2004, has acted as a kind of readable and portable film, to express and dismantle the cinematic organism and furthers her inquiries into the ambiguous nature of reality, memory, and landscape while probing the precarious relationships between historical record, personal anecdote, and fictional narrative.

The exhibition will be on display at MALI from February 16 to June 16, 2024.

Rosa Barba is an artist and filmmaker. Suspended between dichotomies—permanent and impermanent, real and fictional, obsolescent and modern, conceptual and concrete, alien and familiar, Rosa Barba’s multiform practice encompasses films, sculptures, installations, live-performances, text, sound, and site-specific interventions that analyse the ways space is articulated by time and language.