Remai Modern to host Rosa Barba’s first major solo exhibition in Canada
For immediate release — September 20, 2018
Saskatoon, Canada — Remai Modern is pleased to host Send Me Sky, the first major solo museum exhibition in Canada for Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba. Barba is gaining increasing international acclaim for her expansive art practice, which incorporates film, sculpture, installation, performance, sound and text.
The exhibition features a newly-commissioned filmic sculpture, Send Me Sky, Henrietta (2018). The new work is set within a comprehensive selection of Barba’s recent projects, connected through her ongoing investigations of astronomy and cinema.
“It is always thrilling to debut a commissioned piece at Remai Modern. Not only are we supporting the artist’s practice, but also giving audiences in Saskatoon the first opportunity to experience new work,” said Gregory Burke, Remai Modern’s Executive Director & CEO. “Rosa Barba is quickly becoming a defining artist of her generation. Alongside the new commission, this exhibition presents the wide-ranging scope of her materials, methods and ideas. It is all centred on how we see and encounter the world—and how we reach for what lies beyond sight, beyond experience or comprehension.”
Barba shot Send Me Sky, Henrietta at the Harvard College Observatory. The piece is dedicated to American astronomer Henrietta S. Leavitt and her research on observation, quantification and calculation of the colour and luminosity of stars. Works in the exhibition also include the significant installations The Color Out of Space (2015), and Sight Enables Us to Appreciate Distance (2013/2016), as well as additional works in film, installation, sculpture and print.
The exhibition also debuts the newest work in Barba’s White Museum series, which began in 2010. A 70-mm projector with blank film casts a bright frame of light onto the landscape outside the museum, in this case the South Saskatchewan River. Previous iterations of White Museum have illuminated landscapes in New York, São Paulo and Brussels.
“Rosa Barba’s practice is multifaceted but almost always unified by the subject of cinema. Her work considers how film articulates space and complicates notions of time,” said Sandra Guimarães, Remai Modern’s Director of Programs & Chief Curator and curator of Send Me Sky.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new issue of Printed Cinema, which Barba has created alongside her projects since 2004. The publication is part of an ongoing attempt by the artist to reveal and unravel the cinematic organism. The publication stresses the ephemeral nature of film by remaking it as printed matter.
Send Me Sky is accompanied by regular screenings of Barba’s film Disseminate and Hold (2016) and a four-part film series chosen by Barba.
Send Me Sky opens on September 28. That evening, Barba will discuss her practice, research and sources of inspiration at an artist’s talk in Remai Modern’s SaskTel Theatre. The exhibition runs in the Feature Gallery until January 13, 2019.
Barba’s piece Coupez Ici was featured in Remai Modern’s inaugural exhibition Field Guide. She also created a two-part web commission, Unprocessed in States, for Remai Modern’s website in January and April 2017. The museum is developing an approach of working with artists through multiple platforms over extended periods of time.
About Rosa Barba
Rosa Barba (Agrigento, Italy, 1972) lives and works in Berlin. She has a particular interest in film and the ways it articulates space. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role in Barba’s practice. Her work uses conventions of cinema as material, highlighting the physical characteristics of celluloid, light, projectors and sound.
Barba’s work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions and biennials worldwide. Most recently, she has had solo exhibitions at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2017); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017); Vienna Secession (2017); Malmö Konsthall (2017); CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2016-2017); and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2016).
Her work is part of numerous public and private collections and has been widely published. Barba has been awarded numerous prizes, including the International Prize for Contemporary Art (PIAC) by the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco (2016).
About Remai Modern
Remai Modern is a new museum of modern and contemporary art in Saskatoon. It aims to be a vibrant, imaginative and prescient museum committed to affirming the powerful role that art and artists play in questioning, interpreting and defining the modern era. Remai Modern is home to the world’s foremost collection of Picasso linocut prints, and aspires to be a leading centre for contemporary Indigenous art programming.
For additional information contact:
Stephanie McKay, Communications Manager
306.975.2242
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Remai Modern is situated on Treaty 6 Territory and the Traditional Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respects to First Nations and Métis ancestors and reaffirm our relationship with one another.
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