An Evening with Rosa Barba - Thursday, April 11th, Chicago

An Evening with Rosa Barba
Thursday, April 11th, Chicago
Presented by SAIC’s Conversations at the Edge, in collaboration with the Video Data Bank and the Visiting Artists Program
German-Italian artist Rosa Barba’s work takes shape through artists’ books, sculptural film-based installations, and short films. Often set in monumental landscapes, her films combine documentary, performance, and science fiction tropes to examine surreal confrontations between nature, humans, and their technologies. Her subjects include life in the “Red Zone” around Mount Vesuvius, military test sites in the Mojave Desert, and a fictional account of life on a Scandinavian island whose inhabitants attempt to stop the seaward drift of their homes.
Rosa Barba will present a program of her moving image works, followed by a Q&A.
(2007-11, Rosa Barba, Multiple formats, various nations, ca. 70 minutes.)
With Italian roots and raised in Germany, Rosa Barba studied Film and Visual Arts. She has an interest in unusual sites or unlikely situations. In her own words, her filmic vision is "attracted by monumental leftovers, with a weakness for margins, interstices and interludes, and for remote architectural objects which have lost sight of -- although not completely lost -- the human."  The locations portrayed in her works range from military test sites in the Mojave Desert, to concrete igloos in the woods near Mount Vesuvius awaiting catastrophe to fulfill their purpose, to an island whose inhabitants are attempting to stop the seaward drift of their homes. Impending menace is present in many of her works, but it is often punctuated by relics of modernist faith in technology or progress.
Conversations at the Edge (CATE) is a weekly series of screenings, artist talks, and performances by compelling media artists, organized by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and Video Data Bank.
SCREENING DETAILS
Thursday, April 11th, 2013, 6:00 PMGene Siskel Film Center164 N. State Street, Chicago, IL