Emerging Ideas on Art and Society: Rosa Barba

Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) presents Emerging Ideas on Art and Society, which invites an artist, a thinker, or a critic to come and share their doubts, questions, incomplete thoughts, and challenges about what art and society are today. A small group of students and faculty will gather to have an informal but intense conversation with the guest. A short text will be shared in advance to inform the conversation. While we expect active interventions, the guest leads the dramaturgy of the event with the questions they bring to the table that day. 

This conversation’s guest is visual artist, filmmaker, and installation artist Rosa Barba. Artist Rosa Barba explores permanence, impermanence, reality, and fiction through a repertoire of works traversing sculpture, installation, and film. Using performance as a framework and method, Barba examines the unruliness of cinematic apparatuses, the instability of knowledge, and the complexity of astronomical phenomena. Her work examines how space is influenced by temporal and linguistic constructs, challenging traditional understandings of narrative and language. Natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment feature as pivotal actors in Barba’s films, and as proxies for charting political and cultural transformations in society. Using the raw material of cinema–projectors, screens, and celluloid film–Barba probes theoretical and abstract conditions of space and time, creating pieces that often quantify the convergence of light and sound. Her work is part of numerous international collections and recent solo exhibitions include: MAXXI— Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2025-2026), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023), Tate Modern, London (2023), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021-2022), Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017), Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2017) and Secession, Vienna (2017), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2016), and at Biennials such as the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale, and Performa (2013).