Did you know that in Rome there’s an exhibition that is also a bar?

From the outside, the impression is that of an interior already in operation, rather than an exhibition. Once inside, however, this perception is reversed, and the bar reveals itself as an art project in its own right. Bar Far is both an installation and a working bar, conceived by artists Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page, and curated by Vittoria Bonifati for Villa Lontana’s new space in Trastevere. Active for years both individually and in collaboration, the two artists share an interest in the mechanisms of illusion and in how images, materials, and architecture shape—and destabilise—the experience of space. In this project, that research takes the form of an environment in which the work does not sit alongside the architecture but absorbs it, transforming the exhibition space into the work, and the work into an interior to be traversed, used, and inhabited.

In this sense, Bar Far situates itself within the tradition of cafés and art-bars as sites where artistic practice intersects with everyday life. The project looks to historical precedents such as Cabaret Voltaire, the Colony Room, and Rome’s Caffè Greco—frequented by Giorgio de Chirico—informal spaces that often emerged during moments of political and cultural tension, offering fertile ground for conversation, experimentation, and the exchange of ideas. Yet the dialogue is not only with modernity. The environment is built through accumulation and discontinuity: references to antiquity and the Baroque surface alongside pared-back architectural elements, never coalescing into a unified language. The space remains deliberately unstable, shaped by temporal and visual shifts that resist a linear reading.

Keith-Roach’s intervention acts directly on the building envelope. The walls become irregular surfaces from which plaster bas-reliefs and anatomical fragments emerge, destabilising the boundary between structure and decoration. The body is brought into relation with the architecture as both a load-bearing and an improper element, evoking the sense of a building suspended between construction and ruin. Page, by contrast, works on the perception of space through trompe-l’œil painting. On the back wall, he introduces an illusory architectural depth that alters the reading of the space, producing in the viewer a simultaneous sensation of opening, rupture, and collapse.

The materiality of the project is explicitly layered: cementitious binder, plaster, gauze, wood, steel, wire mesh, industrial glues and fillers, acrylic paint and varnish, alongside the functional elements of the bar—from the neon sign to candles, glasses, and matches. Everything contributes to the construction of an environment that holds infrastructure and representation together, without ever sharply separating them, leading the visitor into an elsewhere that is not fully defined yet internally coherent, and marked by a subtle perceptual restlessness.