Rosa Barba: The Ocean of One’s Pause

In the hands of Rosa Barba, film is both ‘an immaterial medium that carries information and a physical material with sculptural properties’. Celebrating the potential of film as a kind of archive, a means of personal storytelling and a physical object in its own right, this show at MoMA covers the last 15 years of Barba’s career (3 May–6 July), comprising not only moving-image works and kinetic sculptures but also live performance. The exhibition takes its title from a work called The Ocean of One’s Pause, in which vocal and instrumental frequencies – played and sung live by Barba and two musicians – prompt a cascade of imagery. Also on show here is Charge, a 25-minute film shot on 35mm and commissioned by MoMA and the Vega Foundation in Toronto, which explores the role of light as a stimulus for social and ecological transformation.

Find out more from MoMA’s website.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary

Still from Charge (2025) by Rosa Barba, co-commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Vega Foundation, Toronto. © Rosa Barba

Still from Charge (2025) by Rosa Barba, co-commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Vega Foundation, Toronto. © Rosa Barba

Still from Charge (2025) by Rosa Barba, co-commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Vega Foundation, Toronto. © Rosa Barba