Rosa Barba makes a poetic explosion at Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has announced an exhibition dedicated to the visual artist Rosa Barba. The Ocean of One's Pause is an installation that spans the past 15 years of Barba's work across disciplines. The centerpiece of the show will be a new commission titled Charge, which will debut in the Mary-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio on the fourth floor of MoMA.

Barba's installation will feature a collection of works consisting of films, kinetic sculptures and sounds. One of the conceptual axes that Barba works around is the reinterpretation of the phenomenal perception of film by viewers. In her kinetic sculpture Boundaries of Consumption (2012) she questions the immaterial spectacles that we observe on film, instead shifting the focus of the viewer onto the materiality of the sculpture itself.

Charge is commissioned by MoMA and the Vega Foundation in Toronto. It is a 35mm film that interprets the role of light as a source of ecological change and a driving impetus behind scientific innovation. It follows another line of thought that Barba has made a hallmark of her artistic practice, which is her fascination with geologic time, the aesthetics of natural artefacts and hidden traces of land use.

In keeping with Barba's practice of using sound to create moving images, her works in The Ocean of One's Pause will be accompanied by a series of performances which the artist has described as “exploded poems.” The percussionist Chad Taylor, vocalist Alicia Hall Moran, and Barba will work together to create a unique soundscape designed to reverberate throughout the installation and activate a symphony of images.

The Ocean of One’s Pause will open on May 3, 2025. There will be a total of six performances scheduled during the duration of the show. Tickets are available to the general public on April 14. More information about this and other events at MoMA can be found on their site.