Photo © Tate (Reece Straw)
In these two works, Barba interrogates the medium of film and its ability to articulate space and time
The Hidden Conference is a film in three parts. Each projection investigates the storage facilities of a European museum, where artworks are kept while not on display. About the Discontinuous History of Things We See and Don’t See, projected in the first room, was filmed at the stores of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2010. About the Shelf and Mantel, shown in the following gallery, was shot in 2015 at Tate Stores in London. It is displayed alongside A Fractured Play, on the left as you enter, which documents the stores of the Musei Capitolini in Rome in 2011.
In each film Barba brings hidden artworks to life, mysteriously moving on invisible wheels. Paintings and sculptures become film characters. They come together in conference, holding imagined conversations across mediums and eras. The Hidden Conference’s three projections have different durations, causing speech, atmospheric sound and periods of silence to overlap. Each film mines archival spaces in which chronology, hierarchy and authority disappear. Barba disrupts art history’s linear narrative and questions the practice of collecting.
Wirepiece operates between the sculptural and the musical. A drum wire is stretched between the ceiling and the floor and ‘played’ by a looped strip of film stock moving through a projector. The transparent celluloid film, a light-sensitive medium which records information, takes on a double role. It acts as a mechanical instrument producing sound while also allowing the projector light to pass through it, spotlighting this process. This sculptural approach to film acts as a punctuation between The Hidden Conference’s three looped films. In Barba’s words, it is ‘a sustain between musical notes.’ Together the works illustrate the artist’s reflection on cinematic space and time as ‘an accumulation… rather than a linear progression.’
Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing 1947
Giacometti has said of the making of Man Pointing: ‘I did that piece in one night between midnight and nine the next morning. That is, I’d already done it, but I demolished it and did it all over again because the men from the foundry were coming to take it away. And when they got here, the plaster was still wet.’ Highlighting the figure’s theatrical pointing gesture and its skeleton-like form, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) described the sculpture as ‘always halfway between nothingness and being’.
Gallery label, March 2025
1/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Woman of Venice IX 1956
In the 1940s, Giacometti began to make tall, elongated figures with roughly defined outlines. These works appear to represent the human figure seen from a distance. The artist explained that when he made large figures, they seemed ‘false’. It was only when he portrayed them as ‘long and slender’ that they truly reflected his vision of humanity. Woman of Venice IX was the last of a group of standing figures of women that Giacometti made for the French Pavilion of the 1956 Venice Biennale.
Gallery label, March 2025
2/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Bust of Diego 1955
From the mid-1950s, Giacometti concentrated on portraiture. He repeatedly drew and sculpted his immediate circle of friends and family. His brother Diego, who sat for this bust, was one of Giacometti’s most frequent models and often assisted the artist in the studio.
Gallery label, March 2025
3/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964
During the late 1950s, Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures with their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender forms appear vivid yet fragile. The writer Jean Genet (1910–1986) commented: 'The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.'
Gallery label, March 2025
4/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Woman with a Broken Shoulder c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964
During the late 1950s, Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures with their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender forms appear vivid yet fragile. The writer Jean Genet (1910–1986) commented: 'The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.'
Gallery label, March 2025
5/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Bust of Annette IV 1962, cast 1965
This work is one of eight busts that Giacometti made of his wife Annette between 1962 and 1965. Although Annette was one of his most frequent sitters, Giacometti approached her anew each time she posed. The artist worked heavily on the surfaces of the sculptures. He commented that ‘after three days of working she doesn’t resemble herself anymore’.
Gallery label, March 2025
6/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Bust of a Man (known as Chiavenna I) 1964
This portrait of Giacometti's brother Diego was made from memory. In his later years, Giacometti was interested in the eyes of his subjects. Many of the portrait busts from this period have a penetrating and intense gaze. 'If I can hold the look in the eyes, everything else follows', Giacometti explained. In the title, Chiavenna refers to the small Italian town where the sculpture was cast, just across the border from Giacometti’s hometown of Borgonovo, Switzerland.
Gallery label, March 2025
7/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Hour of the Traces 1932
Delicate forms balance on this sculpture’s cage-like structure. The shapes are mysterious and their connections unclear, as if in a dream. The lower suspended form could be a beating heart or a stopped clock’s pendulum. Giacometti said that when making sculptures during this period he reproduced images that were ‘complete in my mind’s eye... without stopping to ask myself what they might mean’.
Gallery label, March 2025
8/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Four Figurines on a Stand 1950–1965, cast c.1965–6
Giacometti based this sculpture on a memory of seeing four sex workers across a room from him in Paris several years before. ‘The distance which separated us, the polished floor, seemed insurmountable in spite of my desire to cross it', the artist recalled. The small scale of the figures and the sloping sides of the sculpture’s base recreate the strange sense of distance experienced by the artist. Giacometti made several versions of this work, including a destroyed version created in the basement of the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in 1965.
Gallery label, March 2025
9/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964
During the late 1950s, Giacometti made a number of fragmentary figures with their arms partly or entirely missing. Their slender forms appear vivid yet fragile. The writer Jean Genet (1910–1986) commented: 'The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others.'
Gallery label, March 2025
10/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Alberto Giacometti, Tall Figure II 1948–9
Giacometti said that his figures reflect his own experience of looking at people. Concerned with truly representing this, he often reworked his sculptures over long periods before casting them in bronze. He would build up and strip down the clay model several times, gradually eroding its outline and reducing the work to its essential core. Giacometti’s fragile, elongated figures have often been interpreted as a reflection of the precariousness of life after the Second World War.
Gallery label, March 2025
11/11
artworks in Rosa Barba
Art in this room
Alberto Giacometti
Man Pointing
1947
Alberto Giacometti
Woman of Venice IX
1956
Alberto Giacometti
Bust of Diego
1955
Alberto Giacometti
Standing Woman
c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964
Alberto Giacometti
Woman with a Broken Shoulder
c.1958–9, cast released by the artist 1964
Alberto Giacometti
Bust of Annette IV
1962, cast 1965
You've viewed 6/11 artworks
You've viewed 11/11 artworks