Rosa Barba. Drawing Vocabularies
Event Slider
Date
16 May – 28 Sep 2026
- Sat,
- Closed on Tuesday
Location
Nave and Mezzanine Centro de Arte Moderna GulbenkianPricing
- 8,00 € – 12,00 €
Included in the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian and CAM Temporary Exhibitions admission ticket
For her first large-scale exhibition in Portugal, Rosa Barba ‘redraws’ her vocabularies through this site-specific installation, incorporating performance, film, and sound.
The work of Rosa Barba (Italy, 1972) often considers the juxtaposition of natural landscapes and human-made changes to the environment, archival histories and futures, intimacies between astronomy and cinema, and non-actors as documents. At its core lies an ongoing reflection on impermanence – of materials, of images, and of thought itself.
The title ‘Drawing Vocabularies’ suggests unstable and open-ended processes. It evokes sustained explorations of liminal spaces and the bending of possibilities for reorganising space by deconstructing the cinematic apparatus and filmic environment to reveal spaces beyond cinema.
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In ‘Drawing Vocabularies’, these concerns come together through the physical presence of celluloid film, and cinematic apparatuses, used not only to create moving images but also as sculptural elements in their own right. The exhibition functions like a three-dimensional film and, at the same time, like a musical score – in which cinema allows time and space to vibrate, collapse, overlap, and expand.
With this exhibition, Rosa Barba is the third artist to be offered a ‘carte blanche’ to intervene in the Nave space and to select works from the CAM Collection, creating a multilayered narrative throughout the Mezzanine. Each piece of the Collection is regarded as the protagonist of a conversation linked to the one she has created with her own work on the floor below. Barba focused primarily on art that reveals the intrinsic visual quality of words and writing, and that traces her creative process.
This speculative engagement with histories, storage spaces and memory underlines the artist’s longstanding interest in archival possibilities and places where fact and fiction meet to foster new stories and hidden conversations. The exhibition also explores how archives can construct nonlinear experiences of time.
The exhibition includes visual and sound installations with variations in light intensity, flickering effects, and the layering of sound stimuli. These features may cause some sensory fatigue or discomfort.
For further information or assistance during your visit, the team is available.
Publications
Biographies
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Rosa Barba
Rosa Barba (Agrigento, Italy, 1972) explores permanence, impermanence, reality, and fiction through a repertoire of works traversing sculpture, installation, and film. Using performance as a framework and method, Barba examines the unruliness of cinematic apparatuses, the instability of knowledge, and the complexity of astronomical phenomena. Her work examines how space is influenced by temporal and linguistic constructs. Rosa Barba work is part of numerous international collections and recent solo exhibitions include: MAXXI, Rome (2025) or MoMA, New York (2025) and at Biennials such as the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale, and Performa (2013).
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Benjamin Weil
Benjamin Weil is a Contemporary Art curator, writer and advisor. He was a Curator at SFMOMA, and the Artistic Director at Eyebeam (New York), Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Asturias), and Centro Botín (Santander). He has curated exhibitions and produced works by such artists as Ryoji Ikeda, Joan Jonas, Christian Marclay, Pipilotti Rist and Anri Sala. He spearheaded the reopening of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian – reestablishing it as a core venue for Contemporary Art in Lisbon, with a wide array of exhibitions and experimental projects, including commissioned works by artists such as Gabriel Abrantes, Leonor Antunes, Sara Bichão, Carlos Bunga and Yasuhiro Morinaga.
Curators / artists texts
Rosa Barba
I have invited works from the CAM Collection to come together in the Mezzanine. Perhaps this ‘gathering together’ is a conference, but even more a choreographed session, closer to the arrangement of a performance, with the works reacting to each other in a rhythm throughout a notation in space.
In this exhibition, the videos switch on and off in a choreographed sequence and offer a path to the viewers, but there are also reactions, which can be felt as ‘calls and responses’. A specifically developed
exhibition architecture for the film and video works holds the thoughts together like a hum: sculptures that measure the void, or drawings that reach for an understanding of infinity.
Many works reveal language in its impossibility and fragility, from instructions and ideas to poetry. Some words can be cross read from one work to another, as contemporaries that meet and connect when they come together in a collection.
We are all thinking aloud, while simultaneously trying to communicate with each other, in an effort to clarify things that have not previously been made clear. We aim to make visible the stutter and absences of an archive, and the ever-evolving connections that come to light.
Related Information
Credits
Curator
Benjamin Weil
Rosa Barba
Partners
MAXXI – Museo Nazionale delle Arti di Secolo XXI, Itália
The Barbican Centre, Reino Unido
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation reserves the right to collect and keep records of images, sounds and voice for the diffusion and preservation of the memory of its cultural and artistic activity. For further information, please contact us through the Information Request form.
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