When cinema emerged at the end of the 19th Century, it was among the most disruptive technological and aesthetic innovations of the modern era, radically transforming how people understood the visual world. It unleashed a new range of artistic and linguistic possibilities linked to the moving image, allowing for the documentation of reality and its imaginative manipulation through fiction.
The sudden arrival of moving images—projected onto a screen in public spaces—produced a perceptual shock: an uncanny blend of realism and illusion that deeply unsettled and fascinated early audiences. Confronted with an unprecedented form of representation and narration capable of capturing time, motion and rhythm unfolding dynamically before their eyes, spectators reacted viscerally. Audiences famously panicked at the sight of a train barreling toward the screen in the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat—a moment that epitomized how unprepared they were for the illusionistic force of cinematic movement. It was not merely a technical leap but a profound cognitive and sensory disruption: cinema collapsed the boundary between representation and experience. It didn’t just show the world—it seemed to reconstitute it, reframing and rephrasing it in ways far beyond what earlier media could achieve.
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For decades, Italian artist Rosa Barba has engaged with the language and history of cinema and video, challenging conventional definitions of the medium as a tool for documentation or linear storytelling. For her first major institutional show in the U.S., “The Ocean of One’s Pause” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Italian-born and Berlin-based artist presents a complex multimedia choreography encompassing fifteen years of densely layered, highly articulated work spanning film, kinetic sculpture and sound. “I chose some works from the last 15 years that reflect and expand ideas of the new commission and within the architecture,” Barba tells Observer, when we spoke a few days after the opening. “Some previous works and new works that relate to the main film Charge were coming into the exhibition concept, and eventually developed as a sort of orchestration of sound works, language pieces and kinetic sculptures.”
The elaborate installation operates simultaneously as a personal archive, an anthology of Barba’s practice and a dynamic laboratory that’s perfectly attuned to the procedural, process-driven nature at the core of her experimental approach. At its heart, it’s a study in architecture, transparency and light, as well as an inquiry into the idea of a musical and cinematic instrument.
She says the project emerged from a desire to shape or inhabit a space that resists the confines of language. “While a conceptual grounding may be essential as a way to outline or mark this space, everything else happens in between, or beyond, this framework. It is a constant questioning and reconfiguring of the elements of cinema that produces the space beyond. It is a significant experience, as it activates the senses with new outcomes.”
In her approach to the medium, Barba engages in what she describes as “a constant change of gear” between watching, reading and listening. “This is a risky place that keeps our senses alert through slippage and punctuation. And a search for an anti-immersive place. A collapsing and hybrid space, fragile and bodily powerful at the same time,” she clarifies.
In this sense, her investigation extends into broader questions of semiotics, linguistics and historiography, interrogating the power of visual narratives and languages to record and reconstruct history while simultaneously problematizing the viewer’s position within processes of perception and meaning-making.
As Barba emphasizes during our exchange, by reconfiguring the physical terms of cinematic space, she also seeks to expand and destabilize its conceptual dimensions, such that the formal structures by which we understand cinematic space begin to engage with, and absorb, environments not conventionally associated with cinema. “This could occur, for example, by expanding the works into public spaces or landscapes,” she adds. “The goal is to explore the implications of how those terms coincide with the terms of disciplines and areas of inquiry that lie beyond what we traditionally conceive of as cinema but that nonetheless share some of its foundational components and conditions.”
Barba’s practice critically and experimentally engages with the notion of “Expanded Cinema,” a concept that emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s to challenge the limitations of traditional film by incorporating performance, installation, interactivity and multimedia. Rejecting the single, fixed rectangular screen in a darkened theater as its primary device and container, this more fluid and experimental approach seeks to dialogue with architecture and unconventional spaces, extending the moving image into public contexts and inviting participatory interaction with audiences.
By breaking the “fourth wall” and transforming the viewer into an active participant rather than a passive observer, “Expanded Cinema” opens a space for deeper critical engagement, interrogating the medium as a device, a form of aesthetic expression and a communication tool. This is precisely what Barba’s practice enacts: translating, deconstructing, reassembling and reconfiguring the experiential, conceptual and technical elements of cinema across her diverse multimedia output.
This expansive dimension finds further expression in a series of live performances accompanying the exhibition that reconceive the relationship between cinema, the body and the human voice. In each performance of The Ocean of One’s Pause, the sonic frequencies of percussionist Chad Taylor, vocalist Alicia Hall Moran and Barba herself activate a symphony of images woven throughout the installation. Rather than merely accompanying the moving image, sound takes center stage, initiating a live collaboration between light, voice, rhythm and film that emphasizes their mutual dependence.
Cinema is shaped by a particular non-speculative character, she explains that is rooted in the normative functions of its parts—sound supporting the visual narrative, visual information building toward a structured story and a frontal screen embedded within a darkened architectural setting, operated by hidden machinery. “I am rather looking for an unclassifiable fluidity in the connections between these elements.”
This presentation at MoMA marks a significant milestone in Barba’s career trajectory, following several years of major museum exhibitions and institutional acquisitions. When asked about her approach to this opportunity, Barba says she was immediately drawn to the space—especially its vast window façade, the verticality of the room and the ledge offering a striking view from the fifth floor. “My work takes a conceptual approach that considers cinema in architectural terms and as an instrument, where the environment, the screen and the projection can be combined or pushed forward to create another spatiotemporal dimension that exists concurrently with—and beyond—the context of interior or exterior space.” Uncertainty and speculation exist, she adds, within that expanded space. “It is an anarchic dimension and offers a new foundation for thinking and acting by destabilizing the old hierarchy of the components of cinema, freeing them from their original uses and allowing them to interact in new and unforeseen ways. The resulting eclectic, transitional architecture promotes a spatial and temporal extension into the past and the future, into different existential topographies of cultural forms.”
As she explains while we walk through the space, for this particular project she explored the idea of projecting a film about light onto a screen affixed to the window, functioning like a second membrane of the building—allowing light to pass into the city and return into the space, changing the quality of the environment throughout the day with the movement of the sun.
Barba has explored the affinities between astronomy and cinema for many years. Both disciplines engage deeply with concepts of light, time and distance and are, in a sense, composed entirely of these elements. On another level, astronomy and cinema share, in different ways, fundamental aspects of uncertainty and speculation, she observes. “For this new commission, I engaged further with astrophysics and light, examining sunlight and artificial light as promising sources to influence environmental transformation in the future and as tools to deepen our understanding of the universe.
Both the exhibition and the film generate a different quality of light each day. “Even though the choreography of the movement is repeated daily, the position of the sun in the sky changes,” she points out. “Therefore, the angle of the sun surrounding the screen, along with the light’s intensity and coloration, shifts constantly. Noon in summer produces white light, while it takes on a yellow tint in winter. As the sun lowers, it passes through more of the atmosphere and refracts differently. I’m very interested in this natural alchemistic process of color—and how it transforms the experience of the exhibition space, while conceptually entering into dialogue with the film itself.”
Barba’s work reveals cinema’s fundamentally organic, tactile essence, rooted in light’s interaction with celluloid, and this intersection has become even more pronounced in her recent output. At the same time, as is often the case, the sonic dimension is explored in its technical and spatio-temporal qualities as it interacts with a specific place and architecture. “I considered the space and its height like the body of a musical instrument, and I further developed the wire pieces, where the sound of the musical wires is tuned to the space, resulting in a unique sound specific to this environment,” she explains.
As in previous large-scale monographic exhibitions, Barba resists and disrupts any notion of linear narrative or thematic structure through which a show is conventionally conceived. Embracing simultaneity, fifteen years of her practice unfold here all at once, in a complexly layered yet harmonious choreography that finds its coherence in the principles of her artistic language.
At the Neue Nationalgalerie the works were still staged as a kind of chronologic itinerary, with films and sculptures activating and deactivating at different times. At MoMA, by contrast, the presentation unfolds in two distinct phases: when the film Charge plays, the wire pieces emit sound at a low volume, subtly accentuating the moment when the filmstrip’s scotch tape loop passes over the musical wire. After the film ends, the screen fades to white and Conductor (2012)—a loudspeaker embedded within a silicone membrane—activates, modulating the skin of the sphere. Simultaneously, the wire pieces grow louder in the space.
“Here I’ve been using the specific intersection between works as an investigative tool,” she says, “opening up my conceptual approach even further. For example, architecture is not considered a fixed structure but rather a potential passage, where the environment, the screen and the projection can be combined into a unified structure—and thus a cinematic situation. I’m speaking here about my methods and the way I make and think about my work. This practice exists in a larger context, among other writers and makers who regularly use the same terms, though often toward different ends, with different intentions.”
With this show, Barba reaffirms the restlessly experimental nature of a practice that, in its ongoing interrogation of the medium and constant stretching of its aesthetic, linguistic and technical limits, inevitably loops back to question its own outcomes. Revisiting fifteen years of work becomes, for Barba, an invitation to reconfigure, reimagine and expand the expressive potential of her creations, which function less as fixed statements than as provisional hypotheses—always open to revision, always subject to further transformation.
