Rosa Barba: VOICE ENGINE / Hear, There Where the Echoes Are

This programme marks the conclusion of an invitation extended to Rosa Barba to curate an exhibition of works from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection in conversation with Francesco Stocchi, its former curator of modern and contemporary art.

Starting with Barba’s selection of the film The Tenant (2010) by Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimarães, the project grew into an evolving exhibition including films, videos and sculptural works from the museum’s collection and beyond, suggesting the inclusion of possible pieces into the collection. In addition to works from the collection by Fiona Tan, Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas, and Deimantes Narkevicius, pieces such as Strikes at Time (2011) by Raqs Media Collective, as well as works by Joan Jonas, Jimmy Robert and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, were invited into a propositionally expanding collection.

With the last chapter of her invitation, Barba presents several of her films and sculptures, alternating between exhibition and performance in a choreographic sequence. Installed in the expansive top-floor space of Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen overlooking Rotterdam, this exhibition is augmented and enlivened by vocal and musical performances. For this final instalment, the exhibition takes on orchestral qualities with the presentation of two of her multidisciplinary performances: VOICE ENGINE (2021–2024) and Hear, There Where the Echoes Are (2016–2024).

VOICE ENGINE is emblematic of Barba’s experimental approach to film: it is a monumental new performance work that reconceives the relationship between cinema, the body, and the voice. Set amidst analogue projectors and suspended glass panels, VOICE ENGINE is activated by choral singers and based on a score by composer Eric D. Clark. Singers become protagonists within this set, where their vocalizations trigger projectors to reveal images and text on a constellation of screens surrounding them.

In Hear, There Where the Echoes Are, film projectors are triggered sharply by the diverse frequencies of Chad Taylor’s virtuosic drums’ composition, Rosa Barba accompanies on cello. Again here, sound creates cinema. The collaboration between the artists was first performed in 2016 at PS1, New York, and has been developed and presented internationally since.

The performances evolve over consecutive days, while the auditorium-set forms an exhibition that can be experienced during the day and remains after the series of performances closes.

Barba explores ideas that undergo perpetual transformation of images and their translation through sound. Cinema acts as a sovereign, promising and speculative instrument that interrogates singular and partly unique qualities of space. It is destabilizing the old hierarchy of the components of cinema, and freeing them up from their original use and letting them interact in new and unforeseen ways.

In Barba’s New Auditorium, her work resonates with her sculptural approach to film and the relation between the work and the viewer. In my understanding, Barba says, omission is the action of creating a space that temporally makes use of exclusion for the benefit of highlighting a non-placed narrative. What is actually carved out? What is shaping what within those instabilities? I have come to the conclusion that it is only through light that we produce this particular experience of cinema.

VOICE ENGINE and Hear, There Where the Echoes Are premieres as part of both International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Art Directions: installations programme, and Art Rotterdam 2024.

For more information and tickets, visit here.

Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is the publicly accessible art storage facility of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. In the Depot, visitors experience the result of 175 years of collecting. More than 154,000 objects housed together, arranged in fourteen storage compartments with five different climates. Next to the objects, all the activities that go into preserving and managing a collection are on view in the building.

VOICE ENGINE has been commissioned by International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021, co-produced by Callie’s, Berlin, and remounted by Centre Pompidou 2023.