Rosa Barba’s work is a subtle interrogation and co-option of industrial cinema-as-subject via various kinds of what might be understood as “stagings”—of “the local,” the nonactor, gesture, genre, information, expertise and authority, the mundane—or removals from a social realism within which they were observed and which qualifies them as components of the work, to be framed, redesigned, represented. The effect of this contests and recasts truth and fiction, myth and reality, metaphor and material, to a disorienting degree that ultimately extends into a conceptual practice that also recasts the viewer’s own staging as an act of radical and exhilarating reversal—from being the receiver of an image (a subject of control) to being in and among its engine room(s), looking out.
Ian White, 2011