White Museum (Centre Pompidou)
11-14 June 2026
Place Igor Stravinsky, Paris
With White Museum (Centre Pompidou), Italian artist Rosa Barba offers a reconfiguration of the museum, envisioned no longer as a simple place of preservation or exhibition, but as a projecting vehicle open to the world. The work transforms the building's iconic architecture into a cinematic device on the scale of the city of Paris.
Projected from the 6th floor of the Centre Pompidou, the work inscribes a rectangle of light each night onto the Stravinsky Fountains plaza, offering passers-by an ephemeral, immaterial gallery at the heart of urban space.
For Rosa Barba, the museum projects and projects itself. It exceeds its physical limits to re-enact its role in the public sphere. This inversion of the gaze - from inside to outside - redefines the museum experience, imagining a museum without walls , immaterial, in which everyone is invited to project their own images, narratives and possibilities.
At once a projection apparatus and an architecture of light, White Museum (Centre Pompidou) continues the artist's ongoing research into cinema as an expanded form: a cinema freed from the screen, conceived as a spatial and perceptual experience. Rosa Barba materialises here an imaginary space through a frame of intense white light of monumental dimensions.
By projecting the museum beyond its walls, Rosa Barba amplifies its primary function as a shared place traversed by multiple gazes. The work thus raises a central question: how can the museum be reactivated as a site of community, as a space where individual imaginaries can resonate with one another? By opening a perceptual field rather than imposing content, White Museum (Centre Pompidou) restores to each and every one the possibility of seeing, imagining, and finding their place within the collective space.
Acquired in 2025 with the support of the Friends of the Centre Pompidou and the Joseph Duclos Fund, White Museum (Centre Pompidou) was activated each evening from 11 to 14 June, from 9:30 pm to 1:00 am.
White Museum (Centre Pompidou), 2025
Installation, 70 mm film, 70 mm projector, sound, Duration 2min 30s
200x100x168cm
(Projector dimensions 70 mm)
Photo: François Fleury © Rosa Barba
White Museum (Centre Pompidou) has been on display at the following locations:
Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2026