Cause and effect as the principle and engine of life. The law of Karma, a Sanskrit word for the natural law which translates into “act, and action,” proposes an understanding of causality as a law governing life in the universe: the cycle of life. Karma finds a Western correspondence in Newton’s Third Law, stating that every phenomenal event has its own cause and produces effects, regulating the life of the entire universe in a continuous cycle of birth, moments of sacrifice such as death, and rebirth. 

Janine Thüngen Reichenbach’s “Cause and Effect” harkens back to these concepts, and in particular to the universal thought that all actions in this life determine the fate of future ones. The installation, a 43 cm sphere fraught with irregular red glass shards salvaged from Murano coladas, hangs disruptive from the ceiling in a slow undulatory motion that propagates through time and space. It catches glimmers of light and life in its sharp splinters and shattering into vibrations, alternatively deafening and tenuous, as in an imaginary collision. The continuous body holds an arrhythmic reproduction of this cycle, where the relative elasticity of the sphere is subjected to a compression (cause/action/shock), deformation (effect/shattering/death) and finally to an elastic return (rebirth) whence it regenerates between Karma and quantum mechanics. 

The ambivalent quality of the sphere infused with shards of glass is decisive — we can mirror ourselves in these fragments without ever needing a precise image as a cross-reference, suspended as we are between transparency and obstacle, between visible and invisible, between silence and roar, between radiance and effulgence, because we are beings in a state of constant change. The images thus refer back to the quintessential ontological question, who are we? What is our origin, what is our end? How are our life cycle and destiny expressed? As with glass, so with life and death: with raw material, the energy needed for transformation to give birth to new forms, bring them to life, see them shatter and recycle in a new transformation, a rebirth. 

Text by Francesca de ‘ Medici