Susan Kleinberg’s Universe
Susan Kleinberg’s videos focus on the tension between microcosmos and macrocosmos in an equilibrium. Through the power that is caused by the tension between these two points, Kleinberg asks the audience some questions on how the balance is possible. This questioning is connected to the problem of vitalism concerning life. In all respects, the tension between ‘balance and imbalance’ refers to the history of nature as well as the history of human. The defined scientific rules of the universe work to include the history of art too.
Susan Kleinberg's video project, Balafre, has been created by combining the microscopic images that follow each other as if refusing formation and the sounds from a space research antenna in an unprocessed way. As a result of a joint study with the Louvre Museum Restoration Centre, the images were taken from a sculpture of the year 3000 B.C. found in Iran and the sculpture belongs to the museum collection. The sounds accompanying the images belong to the deep research antenna of the National Centre for Aerospace Research (NASA). How can a 5000-year-old figure of a Mesopotamian Goddess carry thousands of years of history to our day? The smallest area of this figure which we see in the video was shot by a microscope and can bring along a view that looks at the earth from above. Just like the fact that man's psychic stays present even in the simplest points of everyday life. The smallest part covers the whole as well.
Balafre, which means “cuts” and “clefts” in Latin languages, refers to the sign on the crown of the antique figure of which the artist uses the images as well as the cleft between ‘time and space’ by carrying the history and the unknown to the surface.
In her video titled, Tierra Sin Males, Susan Kleinberg links the signs of balance and imbalance to the balance between life and death by combining the spinning globe with a warning board. Just like the idea that libidinal tension between Eros and Death is related to a physical tension, which Freud considers about life, the turning globe is in an absolute balance.
All the videos of Susan Kleinberg are interdisciplinary. In the videos called Tierra Sin Males and Kairos, the physics rules are intertwined with quantum discoveries, art history, anthropology and psychoanalysis. The sounds that NASA obtains from deep fields through its antennas in a way work with Kairos, which means ‘to be in the exact moment’ in time. Tierra Sin Males, on the other hand, is composed of sound waves from the deep that are 1.3 billion years old and gives a historical depth to the physical discovery.
Susan Kleinberg touches the shades of values in the relation between soul and matter from the greatest to the smallest. Despite the fact that every shade forms a balance, the abstract images she uses can also recall an imbalance at any moment. The antique figure in the collection of the Louvre Museum has a cultural significance as well as its historical significance. Just as a traffic sign board coming side by side as a result of a balance moving right and left or up and down, the fragment reference to the antique goddess that is shot in the same manner with a microscope leads to the smallest part becoming integrated
The dialectic between the establishment of equilibrium and the destruction of the equilibrium in a world with opportunities coincide on the question of Kleinberg. The theoretical basis of Susan Kleinberg's Balafre video made in 2017 is the same as the discoveries of Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne who were scientists awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2017 for finding the evidentiary basis for Einstein’s Relativity Theory with the ‘gravitational waves’ that Einstein had foreseen a hundred years ago. Kleinberg, who featured sounds that work as a part of the time of gravitational waves in her videos, was invited to the 2017 Nobel Prize ceremony. These sounds are related to the buzz of the universe that comes along the interferometer which is the most sensitive measure of the earth.
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