Valeria Barbas

Valeria Barbas (b. 1984, Chișinău) is a multimedia artist, composer and art researcher working across sound, performance, video, installation and painting. Trained first as a musician, she earned a B.A. (2001–06) and an M.A. (2006–08) in music composition at the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts in Chișinău, where she also completed a degree in academic singing, and took a further B.A. in painting at the "Ion Creangă" State Pedagogical University. She studied electronic music with Mikhail Afanasiev (2005–06) and in 2017 obtained a PhD in art studies and culturology; she is the author of a monograph on Moldova's new music, has published more than seventy scholarly articles, and worked as senior researcher at the Institute of Cultural Heritage in Chișinău from 2010 to 2024.

Since 2008 Barbas has collaborated with the KSA:K Center for Contemporary Art in Chișinău. In 2011 she took part in the Ghost Pavilion of the Republic of Moldova, an artists' campaign curated by Stefan Rusu that ran parallel to the 54th Venice Biennale in protest against non-transparent selection practices in the national cultural sector. Her international group appearances include the Moldovan–Russian–French exhibition project "Quelles sont nos ruines?" at Les Ateliers du Vent in Rennes (2014), where she presented the sound/video performance Drujba/Amitié, and "Waiting for Better Times" at the Zachęta Project Room in Warsaw (2015). With the German sound artist Frank Schulte she realized the sound-installation projects Wärmepol (2015) and Sky Transmitter (2018), organized by KSA:K and the Goethe-Institut.

In December 2020 she opened the solo concept exhibition Feel Filarmony at the National Museum of History of Moldova, an audio-visual response to the fire that destroyed the "Serghei Lunchevici" National Philharmonic, comprising some twenty photographs, paintings, objects, installations and a documentary film. Her installation White RoOm, developed during the AZART art/text residency Verbarium COVID-19 (2020–21), was presented as a solo exhibition at the CICA Museum in South Korea in 2022. Her experimental films and video works have been selected by numerous festivals, among them AMURAL in Brașov, Simultan in Timișoara, Clujotronic in Cluj-Napoca, In-Sonora in Madrid and the Rencontres Internationales Traverse in Toulouse (2025). She received the National Youth Award in literature and art in 2011 and was named a Champion of Change in 2023, at the gala organized by LID Moldova in partnership with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.

Barbas's practice explores the audiovisual field in connection and disconnection with the body, the negotiation of public space in the post-Soviet city, and the intersections of memory, architecture and mental health. Referencing John Cage and Fluxus while insisting on their relevance to the Moldovan context, she has staged a sound concert for cars in a parking lot behind Chișinău's Department of Culture, based on a score written to be readable by ordinary drivers, and restaged the 1974 painting Friendship by Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu as a tableau vivant; White RoOm questions how the standardized panel housing inherited from the Soviet era affects mental states.

A member of the Union of Composers and Musicologists, the Union of Painters and the Moldovan Association of Women in Cinematography (ANTHILL), Barbas authored and directed the Ars Nova radio programs at Radio Moldova (2014–16) and the television program Zona Ars (now Nova Ars) on the public broadcaster Moldova 1 (2019–25), dedicated to the Moldovan contemporary art scene. Since 2024 she has been a researcher of the KSA:K Center for Contemporary Art archive and artistic director of the International Festival New Music Days in Chișinău, where she continues to live and work.