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Emanations by Italian artist Rosa Barba is their first solo presentation in Australia and features a selection of works from the last 10 years, including 16mm and 35mm film, sculpture and installation. Developed in response to the 2023 Perth Festival theme of djinda – Noongar for cosmos or stars – the exhibition revolves around Barba’s long-standing exploration of the connections between film and astronomy, and their shared engagement with concepts of light, time and distance.

The film Drawn by the Pulse (2018) is dedicated to American astronomer Henrietta S. Leavitt (1868–1921) whose study of the ‘flicker’ of stars revolutionised our understanding of the size of the cosmos. In The Color Out of Space (2015) images of stars and planets are projected through a series of coloured glass panels while the voices of scientists, writers and artists ruminate on the universe and its enigmas. Alongside film, Emanations includes several sculptural and text-based works where fragments of language are projected, printed and cut into materials such as film, felt and paper to draw our attention to the relations between language and its representation as text and image.