Published 20 JAN 2025

1 FEB until 5 MAR 2025

Esther Schipper is pleased to present They Are Taking All My Letters, a presentation by Rosa Barba, who has had two solo exhibitions with the gallery. On view will be a new kinetic sculptural work using celluloid and a work cast in steel.

Rosa Barba’s practice merges films, sculptures, installations, live performances, text pieces, and publications that are grounded in the material and conceptual qualities of cinema. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging by inviting the viewers to participate in her cultural observations.

A new wall-mounted kinetic sculpture, They Are Taking All My Letters, 2025 features 34 vertical strips of 70mm celluloid film that move across its rectangular surface, lit from the back. The 34 lines are in constant motion as a sequence of words in white printed letters on a black background scroll up and down. The fragments draw on texts by the American poets Susan Howe, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, as well as on the artist’s own writings. The excerpts are held together conceptually by themes of time, flickering light and language.

One challenge is in reading the texts: whether by moving one’s eye up or down a vertical loop or by jumping across the lines to observe a constant rearrangement, a new editing and orchestration is ever evolving and changing. The work creates an interesting temporal parallax by using a nearly obsolete medium such as celluloid film across the grain, so to speak: Not only does the work exclusively “depict” text, not images as such, but because it is not moving at the 24 frames per second that are at the root of film’s illusion of movement, the film is not strictly speaking cinematic. Instead, each thread moves at its own speed, turning the film into a vehicle for text, and just as with speech, each speaker has their own pace of expression.

Nearby, a sculptural work made from lead letters on steel, Language Infinity Sphere, 2018, further emphasizes the role of language and its dissolution in Barba’s work. The set of found letterpress characters, from a printer of literary texts, covers the steel sphere, creating a new printing tool. Yet, the sculpture breaks up any syntactical promise of language, as its fragments create a visual representation of characters, more landscape than text. The work is part of a series of sculptures and prints made with thousands of old metal letterpress blocks. While the function of these letters has been overtaken by new methods of printing and distributing texts, their arrangement follows the logic of form rather than an alphabetical order—an encryption that formulates the instability of knowledge, or perhaps a lost or new language.

Solo exhibitions by Rosa Barba will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 2025 (including two weekends of performances), at MdbK, Leipzig in May 2025, MCA, Zagreb in September 2025 and at MAXXI, Rome in November 2025. A monograph on Rosa Barba’s work is forthcoming in 2025 as part of the Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series.

Rosa Barba was born in Agrigento, Italy. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Barba studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and has completed her PhD with the title On the Anarchic Organization of Cinematic Spaces: Evoking Spaces beyond Cinema at the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University in 2018, which was published by Hatje Cantz in 2022. She has been a visiting professor at MIT, ACT (Program in Art, Culture and Technology), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barba holds a professorship “Art in Space and Time” at the ETH Zürich.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Evoking a  Space Beyond the Cinema, MALI Museum, Lima (2024); Rosa Barba: The Hidden Conference, The Tanks at Tate Modern, London (2023); Rosa Barba: Emanations, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Perth (2023); Rosa Barba: In a Perpetual Now, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021); Rosa Barba, Armory Park Avenue, New York (2019); Rosa Barba: Send Me Sky, Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2018); Rosa Barba: Solar Flux Recordings, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2017); Rosa Barba: From Source to Poem to Rhythm to Reader, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017), and Rosa Barba: Spacelength Thought, Secession, Vienna (2017)

Among institutional collections that hold Barba’s work are: Centre Pompidou, Paris, Collezione MAXXI, Rome; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Bremen; Kunsthaus Zürich; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporanéo, Castilla y León; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Germany; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Staatliche Museen Berlin – Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Tate Modern, London; The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.

For press inquiries please contact David Ulrichs. Tel: +49 (0) 176 50 33 01 35 or david@davidulrichs.com.

1 FEB until 5 MAR 2025

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Cemile Sahin’s ROAD RUNNER, which presents all new works. This is Sahin’s second project at the gallery after a presentation in the Niche space in in 2021, the year she joined the program.

ROAD RUNNER transforms the exhibition space into a vivid environment that employs the colorful, staggering visual language of pop culture and video games to address contemporary political topics, among them the use of drones by corporations, authoritarian regimes, and the military. On view will be a film, sixteen unique aluminum panels, and six custom-made punching bags. Reflecting on a world of loudly competing stimuli, the new works are presented within an eye-catching exhibition design, with multi-colored text passages and a yellow carpet.

Sahin’s work speaks about family and loss, as well as about the technologies facilitating digital disembodiment and political oppression. She not only comments on these defining technologies, such as drones and AI, but uses them as tools in her cutting-edge artistic process.

The film, also entitled ROAD RUNNER, employs a fast mix of genres: cinematic storytelling alternates with drone footage, faux commercials, animations and video games. ROAD RUNNER imagines a dystopian future in which killer drones have seized control and established a brutal order. It tells the story of Bêrîtan, who struggles to free her sister from digital captivity in a parallel Virtual Reality. Inspired by the ubiquity of games such as GTA (Grand Theft Auto) or Counter Strike, ROAD RUNNER is a mash-up of narrative strategies from film, TV, video games and social media platforms. It’s hybrid aesthetics draw on the quick, direct communication of TikTok videos as well as on the tough, militaristic do-or-die storytelling of gaming culture.

The film’s narrative fictionalizes a major theme in Sahin’s work: drones as concrete instruments of surveillance and military intervention. With it, she continues to explore the connection between video games, military training, authoritarian regimes, and arms trade, and takes drones as a larger symbol of the entanglement of entertainment, corporate and authoritarian powers. Thus, drones and the impact of weapons are important recurring themes explored for example in her work Gewehr im Schrank (Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, 2023), and Drone Valley (Biennale in Lyon, 2022).

A group of sixteen large-scale wall-mounted aluminum panels feature bright, flashy motifs created using AI. Each panel is unique. The works were created by Sahin with a machine-learning image tool: first training it on her own work, Sahin used verbal prompts to generate specific pictures, and then fine-tune them, in effect employing AI as a tool for realizing images she had imagined. Printed on pearly-white photographic paper and mounted on aluminum, the panels combine the images with short texts that introduce a deliberately ambiguous subtext: the phrases can be read as ironic, profound or sometimes simply meme-like and nonsensical.

The images have an exaggerated cuteness, the kind of aesthetic deemed most successful by algorithms (and behaviorists): balloon letters, pretty flowers, cute (or scary) dogs, fancy cars, stylish women, lustrous fingernails, but also guns and knives. With their brilliant color and brash subject matter, the panels put into playful form serious topics: what are we to make, say, of glossy bullets floating on a lipstick-red background or a golden knife held by a hand with long pink nails? The visual pleasure masks a certain horror, not least at its near-irresistible seductiveness. Yet there is no cynicism or judgement in Sahin’s works: This is how it is, the artist seems to suggest, fun and tragedy coexist.

A number of hanging punching bags are printed with motifs related to the film ROAD RUNNER. In the film, Bêrîtan trains with a boxing community that helps her gain the strength to rescue her sister. The bags function as an extension of the film’s narrative into the exhibition space, the virtual spilling over into the real.

Cemile Sahin’s new film ROAD RUNNER is presented in collaboration with CIRCA and funded by

#CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model supporting the free public programme and the annual CIRCA PRIZE, of which Cemile Sahin was a recipient in 2023. Since launching in October 2020, CIRCA has re-distributed over £1,000,000 of #CIRCAECONOMY funds in public art commissions, cash grants, scholarships, and charitable donations, supporting the creative ecosystem and empowering artists globally.

Cemile Sahin was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1990. She studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. The artist lives and works in Berlin. Sahin’s debut novel TAXI was published in 2019, followed by her book ALLE HUNDE STERBEN in 2020 (translated into English in 2024). For TAXI Sahin was awarded the Alfred Döblin-Medaille. In 2024 Sahin’s third novel, Kommando Ajax, was published by Aufbau Verlag.

The artist’s exhibitions and projects include: Sieh Dir die Menschen an!, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, Chemnitz (2024) and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2023); Gewehr im Schrank – Rifle in the closet, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2023); A Song of Tigris and Euphrates, Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2022); Manifesto of Fragility, Lyon Biennial, Lyon (2022); Identität nicht nachgewiesen, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2022); Laboratory of Contested Space / Art & Truthtelling, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2020); ars viva 2020, Kunstverein, Hamburg (2020) and Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2019).

Her works are included in the collections of Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Kunsthaus Zürich; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin/Düsseldorf; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Servais Family Collection, Brussels; and Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (The Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Germany).

For press inquiries please contact David Ulrichs. Tel: +49 (0) 176 50 33 01 35 or david@davidulrichs.com.