Rosa Barba in Amsterdam

Anyone taking a city break in Amsterdam over the next few months would do well to pay a visit to the EYE, the Netherlands’ national film institute. It’s worth a visit simply for the free ferry ride to the museum and the remarkable architecture that was designed by Viennese architecture firm Delugan Meissl. From the outside it appears rather like a grounded UFO, while inside it is surprisingly spacious and open. The enormous glass façade on the water virtually allows the dividing line between inside and outside to merge. The spacious tiered structure and the popular museum café with its spectacular view invite visitors to linger. Numerous ceiling lights by Olafur Eliasson exude additional light and an upmarket feel.

Instead, something moves in the back corner of the room: Rosa Barba’s work “Western Round Table” (2007). Transparent film runs on two projectors facing each other, underpinned by various fragments of sound from films by Fellini. Instead of projecting images, the projectors cast the shadows of each other onto the opposite wall. In line with the title, this rather ghostly seeming dialog is reminiscent of a historic gathering of artists after World War II which, due to a lack of documentation, has become an art-historical event steeped in secrecy.

Wonderfully abstract color effects

The adjoining rooms are pleasantly spacious, with just one work to a room in many cases. One example is the contribution by Tacita Dean with its programmatic title “FILM”, a work that was developed in 2011 for the monumental Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern. The vertically projected film strip is a poetic film collage that can be understood as an homage to analog film techniques. Dean used only analog processes, for example for coloring the images of colored glass, not entirely unlike Rosa Barba’s installation at the SCHIRN.

The exhibition concludes with two works by Rosa Barba. The larger of the two is called “Bending to Earth” and was already shown in 2015 in Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition “All the World’s Futures” at the Venice Biennale. On a pictorial level the work shows radioactive fields, generally permanent disposal sites for nuclear waste in the USA, which Barba filmed – in analog, of course – from the air in slow, circular movements. The images are supplemented by a text and sound collage made up of radio recordings. An impressive projector is also part of this work. The almost monstrous machine with its huge, horizontally mounted spool is an Italian invention from the 1950s. It is able to play a full feature film in a loop, entirely without a human projectionist.

Virtually hypnotic

The anonymized film technology never saw success, however, as emphasized by Barba’s model, which seems as though it could represent an extinct species. In one corner of the room, small and delicate, is “Invisible Act” from 2010. A projector positioned directly in front of the wall casts a small rectangle of light onto it. Empty “frames” run through the projector and are projected onto the wall. At the same time, the light is reflected back from the wall onto the projector. A ball is rolling on a transport track into which the film is guided. Through the incessant, monotonous movements of projector, film, ball and flickering light image, this actually very simple experimental assemblage develops a virtually hypnotic effect.