Under the title of A Fictional Library – Live, a project for CAC Vilnius, Rosa Barba recreates the main space of the museum to hold a complex dialogue with the cinematographic devices that the artist has been using in recent years and that are a distinctive element of her work. The result is an active ‘filmic/sonic/sculptural’ environment of slowly shifting narrative discourses that replaced traditional ways of viewing and listening. Ambulant audiences, somehow enveloped within the flickering images and passing through different complexes of autonomous entities, would become sensitized to the simultaneity of messages and physical registers and thereby become cognizant of the role played by their own movements and perceptions in the production of the whole experience.
In the middle of the exhibion space, a big backdrop/screen, running perpendicular to the longitudinal direction, keeps track of the entries and exits of people from this ‘set’. Film, image, light, projection machines and texts form a well-organised narrative on this big backdrop, but are also located in strategic points of the hall, creating different narrative and formal intensities and establishing its own tempo and action. Using an overhead projector, a 35mm film is projected from one side towards the crosswise screen, which, on the other side, receives the rest of the filmic elements in form of texts, sounds and other devices.
Next to this central piece – A Home for a Unique Individual – the exhibition establishes a kind of choreography through other pieces made by Rosa Barba in the past four years. Some of them acts as a poetic and hypnotic gestures. Color Studies consists of two confronted projectors and a small screen located in the middle of both where changing colour fields are projected on. This piece is reaffirmed throughout the exhibition from a anti-hierarchical position. Other pieces, however, play a more solemn role throughout the exhibition. It is the case of The Contemplative or The Speculative. Through a strong literary component, this piece questions modes and common systems to understand works of art regardless of their convenctional nature.
As is the case in other pieces and exhibitions by Barba, there is in A Fictional Library an interest in dismantling the narration in different elements, such as text, sound or image, as a kind of oblique experiments on the relationships between word and image, in order to transform it all in an asynchronous space.
Curator: Juan de Nieves
Photographs by Marta Ivanova
