Throughout Rosa Barba’s work the way we occupy space is questioned by investigating crisis through a speculative treatment of time and language. Time is conceived as an accumulation, an archive, rather than a linear progression. Language is abstracted, eluding its typical semiotic function. The destabilizing effects of stories are activated by Barba’s use of both fundamental concepts of time and language in non-traditional ways that set in motion and interweave the exhibition site with the space explored on screen. Scrutinizing these concerns unfolds through the deconstruction of the cinematic apparatus and filmic environment, which is constituted by film’s physical materials—projectors, screens and celluloid— as well as its ambient elements: time, space, light and sound. Cinema is here used to stage an intervention in a real space, confronting the division between public and private, fantasy–fiction and reality. Charge is ultimately an investigation of light as a source to transform the future. Expressed through inventive technologies, in large and very small-scale experiments whose set up evoke performative rituals, Charge is further overlaid with cinematic structural possibilities. Filming industrial light installations and structures in the vastness of scarred landscapes, documenting experiments in physics labs, introducing light experiments through a cinematic lens and following community driven efforts to use light as a promising source to influence environmental transformation.
Charge, 2025
35mm film, color, optical sound, 25:33min
Co-commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Vega Foundation, Toronto.
Dimensions variable
Film still © Rosa Barba
Charge, 2025 has been on display at the following locations:
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 2025
Charge, 2025 has been screened at the following locations: