The 16mm work A Private Tableaux (2010) points the camera at a series of drawings which are identified as works of art for as long as their perceiver cannot decipher them. The film begins with short fragments of text, introducing a peculiar perspective to a staged scenery that is repeatedly interrupted by textual insertions. The camera navigates along the sparsely lit walls of a tunnel system on which the engineers have marked flaws and cracks for decades. The traces of the cracks in the arches of the tunnel, their chalk doubles, demonstrate, just like artworks in a storage, an indirect imprint of what waits outside: the ruling narrations of art history in the former case and the menacing traffic above ground in the latter. The boundaries of art shift as they enter a filmic archive of different points of views which construct new relations out of old rejections.
A Private Tableaux, 2010
16mm film, color, optical sound; 7 min
Images 1, 2: Film still © Rosa Barba
Image 3: Installation view at at CAC Vilnius, 2014 © Rosa Barba
A Private Tableaux, 2010 has been on display at the following locations:
Malmö Konsthall, 2017
CAC Vilnius, 2014
BIM Buenos Aires, 2014
Bergen Kunsthall, 2013
Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2011
Galleria civica, Trento, 2011
carlier gebauer, Berlin, 2011
Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2011
Tate Modern, London, 2010
A Private Tableaux, 2010 has been on display at the following locations:
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2023
MoMA, New York, 2016
ICA London, 2013
Gene Siskel Center, Chicago, 2013
Filmforum, Gorizia, 2013
Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern, London, 2010