Mesmerizing Machinery: Rosa Barba at Esther Schipper

The sun and moon appear the same size to us because, in a striking coincidence, the sun is both 400 times larger than the moon and 400 times farther from Earth. I am awed each time I recall this fact; it suggests the universe makes sense in a poetic way. I had the same feeling while viewing Rosa Barba’s Stellar Populations (2017/2022), a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture. In the piece, one clear loop of film is pulled taut by two mechanisms that cause it to bump repeatedly into another, red st