Rosa Barba Poised Compression

Press Release

Corbett vs. Dempsey is honored to present Poised Compression, an exhibition of sculpture, film, and sound by Rosa Barba. This is Barba’s first show at the gallery and her Chicago debut. CvsD previously screened her film “Radiant Exposures – Facts Run on Light Beams These Days” and released her CD (with drummer Chad Taylor) titled In a Perpetual Now of Instantaneousness. If our present moment is, as Rosa Barba has postulated, held captive by a particular version of the cinematic, one that we deploy unquestioningly with screens and projections of every imaginable scale, how can an artist critique and interrogate those by now thoroughly internalized mechanisms of viewing? Over the course of two decades, Barba has sought to rewire the cinematic stranglehold on our collective phenomenological reality. Both in the content of her films and in her inventive deconstruction of the cinematic apparatus, the Italian-born, Berlin-based artist has created an extensive oeuvre of free-standing and wall-hanging works, as well as movies, music, writings, performances, and installations that deeply question cinema’s construction of time, space, and perspective and subvert the way it has been subtly substituted for the popular unconscious. Poised Compression is the first gallery exhibition to follow (with a short cross-fade) Barba’s highly lauded solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Ocean of One’s Pause, which surveyed fifteen years of her work and included performances and screenings, as well as an installation of the work in MoMA’s permanent collection. CvsD’s presentation includes one pivotal work that also appears in MoMA’s show, her 2009 sculpture “One Way Out,” which conceives of a film projector as a mysterious kind of feeder, spooling celluloid up into and back out from a swath of HVAC tubing, which amplifies the sound of the film as it bounces against the metal edges; over time, the film’s image, which is simultaneously being projected against a wall, acquires scratches made during the continuous action of its being sucked up into the pipe. The show includes two other kinetic sculptural works. “Color Clocks: Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints” (2012) consists of three towers with open housings each containing red, yellow, or blue 35mm film strips imprinted with letters spelling the colors they represent, which slide through a mechanical set of rollers in an infinite loop. The exhibition’s title work, “Poised Compression” (2023) is a wall-hanging, glazed metal box in which three spools rotate continuously, spinning strips of 35mm film in an ever-shifting pattern of lines, a kind of perpetual drawing machine. The exhibition also includes two still pieces, “Weavers” (2023), framed wall-works consisting of woven red and milky white 16mm film as an abstract painting, a ductile reclamation of cinema’s basic means of production.

Rosa Barba (b. 1972, Agrigente, Italy) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, and the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, where she completed her PhD in 2018. Recent and upcoming solo institutional exhibitions include the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2026, upcoming); MAXXI, Rome (2025, upcoming); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); MALI, Lima (2024); Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam (2024); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); Tate Modern, London (2023); and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Australia (2023). Her work is held in numerous collections internationally, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Tate Modern, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; among many others.