Descrizione
Printed Cinema (2004–) is an ongoing attempt to reveal and unravel the cinematic organism, stressing the ephemeral nature of the image’s surface by remaking it as printed matter.
German Italian artist Rosa Barba has, since 2004, regularly published Printed Cinema, a kind of readable and portable film, to express and dismantle the cinematic organism. The series, which won the 2006 Artist Book Award at the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, is printed alongside Barba’s film projects, creating a supplementary literature, sourced from film stills, text, and photographs and including research material and unused filmic fragments. Each issue is published on the occasion of an exhibition, where it is distributed for free for the limited time of the show.
Addressing key tendencies in Barba’s work, questioning how we occupy space by investigating crisis through an unusual treatment of time and language, the issues are intended not as companions to Barba’s installations but rather as extended and free-form experiments in word and image that can be encountered alongside cinematic experiences or stand on their own. The filmic projection is translated onto paper and confronted with its conditions—its materiality and temporality—reshaping the text and image fragments from the moving image into stillness. The shift in medium from projection to print emphasizes the difference of such experiences of image and text, exposing their relationships, overlaps, and hierarchies. Alongside Barba’s film installations, sculptures, and text-based wall works, these publications further her inquiries into the ambiguous nature of reality, memory, and landscape while probing the precarious relationships between historical record, personal anecdote, and fictional narrative.
The publication series records Barba’s continuous critical engagement with the material and sociopolitical conditions of the cinematic apparatus in a contemporary environment dominated by visual information. By means of translation, layering, and fragmentation, the publications reveal structuring principles of how visual information and the moving image specifically become a means of knowledge production, organizing the social and geographical dimensions of the spaces we inhabit. Drawing on a conception of space and language that is equally shaped by cultural, scientific, geological, and geographical transformations, Printed Cinema expands those dimensions that project the possibility of activating a collective subconscious—an artistic method to release and reach into the oscillating environments of the works they accompany. Based on actual, present phenomena—contested places and precarious social transformations, such as those in Peru or at the border zone of Cyprus and Turkey—the series reflects and documents recurring themes in Barba’s artistic research and methodology in order to open doors into new and unpredictable spaces.
The artist explains, “The publication project Printed Cinema continues my audiovisual work as a personal reflection on the essence of the cinematographic: images are merely articulated in the space in between images. Gaps, ellipses, dialectics between images—essentially modernist notions—are essential in that respect. In Printed Cinema, this is expressed in the editing principle, as well as in the oppositions between film and printing, between text and image. The specific distribution method, of course, extends the project into a wide range of cultural and social contexts. In this way, Printed Cinema challenges the outer edges of the artist’s book. Mechanisms proper to the film medium find their translation in a different context.”
This collection brings all issues of Printed Cinema together in a handsome archival and expandable case. The purchase of the edition comes with an ongoing subscription to future issues.
Volumes
Printed Cinema #1 – Broadcasting from Home appeared as a free supplement to the first season issue of the Austrian art magazine Springerin (October 2004).
Printed Cinema #2 – Parachutable Obstacles was distributed by the Australian Center of Contemporary Art (ACCA), on the occasion of the exhibition A Molecular History of Everything.
Printed Cinema #3 – Accidental Suspension was distributed by the Art Gallery of York University Toronto in May and June 2005.
Printed Cinema #4 – Who can tell I’m inventing? was distributed by the 9th Istanbul Biennal in 2005.
Printed Cinema #5 – Outwardly from Earth’s Center was distributed with Ein + Alle Magazin of the Kunsthalle Fridericianium and by the Kunstverein Kassel in 2005.
Printed Cinema #6 – Wrong Edit was distributed as a special edition by JUNI KunstZeitSchrift and Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2006.
Printed Cinema #7 – Waiting Hall/Terminal was distributed in connection to the exhibition Gouda Lichtjaren. Gouda, Netherlands, 2007.
Printed Cinema #8 – Waiting Grounds was distributed on the occasion of the exhibition They Shine at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam in 2007–2008.
Printed Cinema #9 – Save the Drifting of Gotska Sandön was distributed by Index Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden; Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; and the Baltic Art Center,Visby, Sweden in 2008.
Printed Cinema #10 – Vertiginous Mapping was published on the occasion of the launch of the web project Vertiginous Mapping, commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, New York, and was distributed by Dia Beacon in 2008.
Printed Cinema #11 – Idea in Abstract was distributed by Tate Modern, London, 2011.
Printed Cinema #12 –Stage Archive was distributed by the Galleria Fondazione Civica, Trento, Italy, in 2012.
Printed Cinema #13 – Desert – Performed was distributed by Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, 2012.
Printed Cinema #14 – Subconscious Society – a Feature was distributed by Museo de la Inmigración, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2014.
Printed Cinema #15 – Blind Volumes was distributed by Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany, in 2016.
Printed Cinema #16 – De la Source au Poème was distributed by CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France, in 2017.
Printed Cinema #17 – Spacelength Thought includes 12-inch vinyl record Enigmatic Whisper, and was distributed by Secession, Vienna, in 2017.
Printed Cinema #18 – From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader was distributed by Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, in 2017.
Printed Cinema #19 – Send Me Sky, Henrietta was distributed by Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 2018.
Printed Cinema #20 – Aggregate States of Matters was distributed on the occasion of the release of the edition of the collected box set of Printed Cinema.
Printed Cinema #21 – Inside the Outset- Evoking a Space of Passage was distributed by Waino Aaltonen Museum, Turku, Finland, in 2021.
Printed Cinema #22 – Plastic Limits was distributed on the occasion of the exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in 2021.
The publication box comes with a subscription for the future issues of Printed Cinema with no additional costs for the acquiring party. The issues will be sent to the box owners as they are published.
