Tuesday, March 29, 2022 at 7pm
Rosa Barba's Printed Cinema
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
From Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light to ASCO’s No Movies to Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover, cinema by other means has been an ongoing subject of research for Light Industry—artworks that refigure the terms of cinema by forgoing its technological apparatus. The endeavor continues this evening with artist Rosa Barba, who will be joining us to screen selections from her films and discuss her ongoing Printed Cinema series, a suite of publications that she produces and freely distributes to accompany exhibitions of her work. Each of these pieces, described by Dancing Foxes Press as “a kind of readable and portable film,” have been gathered together by the publisher and are newly available as a box set that includes the 22 issues to date and a subscription for future issues. The editions will be for sale at the event.
Born in Sicily and based in Berlin, Barba has created a body of work that frequently engages with the potentials of expanded cinema and its concomitant emphasis on filmic materials. “Barba anatomizes the apparatus, reconstituting it in an array of sculptural forms,” critic Erika Balsom has observed. “She places motorized film loops in light boxes (Coupez ici [Cut Here], 2012), modifies a typewriter to deboss letters directly onto celluloid (Spacelength Thought, 2012), and creates rhythmic multiprojection installations of flashing light and color (Hear, There, Where the Echoes Are, 2016). Even projectors used to display films in a relatively conventional manner retain a strong physical emphasis. Rather than being hidden away in a booth, they are on view as grand, imposing objects that rival the image in the fascination they inspire.”
Alongside these direct encounters with cinema’s material history, Barba is also concerned with how cinematic grammars might survive the transition to different mediums. “The publication project Printed Cinema,” she explains, “continues my audiovisual work as a personal reflection on the essence of the cinematographic: images are merely articulated in the space in between images. Gaps, ellipses, dialectics between images—essentially modernist notions—are essential in that respect. In Printed Cinema, this is expressed in the editing principle, as well as in the oppositions between film and printing, between text and image. The specific distribution method, of course, extends the project into a wide range of cultural and social contexts. In this way, Printed Cinema challenges the outer edges of the artist’s book. Mechanisms proper to the film medium find their translation in a different context.”
FREE
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm.