BERLIN.- For its reopening the Neue Nationalgalerie presents in its Graphic Cabinet various works by the Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba, under the title “In a Perpetual Now.” Along with notable pieces from her work from the years 2009 to 2021, a new film created for the exhibition is being shown. With its architectural structure the large steel construction refers to Mies van der Rohe’s early project “Brick Country House,” while also displaying 15 of her cinematic and sculptural works. Specially produced for the architecture of the Neue Nationalgalerie, the expansive installation follows the principle of cinematic montage, which plays a key role in the artist’s work.

Among the exhibition’s central motifs are questions relating to the dimension of time. With regard to the show’s title, “In a Perpetual Now,” the question arises: would it really be desirable to live perpetually in the present? Without past and future our entire lives would endlessly rotate in place. Here the Italian-German artist Rosa Barba invokes a radical idea, a utopia. The questioning and redefinition of fixed notions of time, space, and objects are major features of Barba’s art. Her films, for example, do not function in the traditional sense, because the artist frequently incorporates the technical aspects of filmmaking: the camera, the lighting, the movement, the projector, and the eponymous material film. “Spacelength Thought” (2012) is one example. Thinking and recording, writing and showing here take place so slowly and with so much material attrition that finally the single thought lies before you in long loops of film on the floor.

The artist avoids classical narrative. When Rosa Barba devotes herself to vast, desert-like landscapes, monstrous archives, huge technological sites, or architecture there is rarely any sequence to these “portraits.” You see the camera panning, various scenes follow one another, and yet amazingly find yourself trapped on one and the same time plane. In these meditations even graphic signs of a past, like dust-covered objects or landscapes transformed by our civilization, automatically line up in the present, or remain indefinite, almost timeless.




This is particularly evident in the film “Enigmatic Whisper” (2017), which was made in Alexander Calder's studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. At this place everything has been preserved just as the great sculptor left it. But with Rosa Barba this dead world reawakens. Single tools, flowers, and a moving mobile become self-assured actors in a kind of ghost world. The movements of her hand-held camera underscore the immediacy of filming, the “now” moment. The world of sound, especially—Jan St. Werner, Andrew Barker, John Colpitts—lends the portrait a tremendous presence and actuality. Ultimately you can no longer say whether the studio visit took place today, yesterday, or a long time ago. “With my pictures I am interested in losing all feeling of time and scale,” the artist explains. “To me time means a kind of deep geological time, like a time exposure, but made in such a way that the picture doesn’t blur—instead you see the depth and structure of a movement or a story, with all its changes.”

For the exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie Rosa Barba was inspired by the early, visionary designs of Mies van der Rohe and his notions of architecture as a “new life form.” These ideas are especially manifest in his famous design for “Brick Country House” (1924), with a seemingly almost abstract ground plan consisting merely of free-standing walls with a space flowing between them. Rosa Barba has adopted this vagueness and openness in her steel construction “Blind Volume” (2021). The installation functions like an archive of her own works, and wholly in the Miesian sense provides a chance to experience space as an unlimited continuum.

“In a Perpetual Now” presents films, sculptures, and objects that are about space itself. In “Color Studies” (2013) and “Boundaries of Consumption” (2021), for example, projectors operate by themselves, completely shifting the filmic into actual space. “Plastic Limits” (2021), a new film created specially for the exhibition, is devoted to the Neue Nationalgalerie’s glass hall, a monument of clarity and precision. The film provides an entirely new view of a structure already featured in thousands of photographs—veiled in fog and placed in complex relationships with other “modern” structures in Berlin.

The exhibition was curated by Joachim Jäger