::::::::: SOCIOPLASTICS : Unstable Love and the Physics of Affection * Photography’s Duration Versus Video’s Collapse * ULS 1000

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Unstable Love and the Physics of Affection * Photography’s Duration Versus Video’s Collapse * ULS 1000

Unstable Love Series (ULS) articulates a sociopolitical poetics of sudden collapse through a rigorously minimal grammar: two everyday objects confronted one-to-one. Across one thousand objects—five hundred photographic pairs and five hundred videos—the work stages intimacy as a precarious equilibrium rather than a sentimental bond. The objects are banal, legible, and culturally saturated; scissors, fruit, tools, ornaments, fragments of domesticity. Their pairing is neither allegorical illustration nor narrative metaphor but an experimental condition. Each dyad is installed to resist gravity momentarily, an ethics of balance that mirrors contemporary social bonds under pressure. The project’s conceptual spine is not love as fusion, but love as a negotiated tension, an unstable contract that persists only while forces remain counterweighted. In this sense, ULS inherits a lineage from post-minimal sculpture and relational aesthetics while refusing participation as spectacle. The series instead insists on a cold clarity: affect is produced by structure, not by expressivity. The sociopolitical dimension emerges precisely here—collapse is not melodrama but systemic failure. The work reads the present as a field of short-term alignments and long-term fatigue, where intimacy is rehearsed under conditions of imminent fracture. Photography and video in ULS are not documentary supports but antagonistic epistemologies. The photographic image performs duration: it arrests the dyad at its most ethical moment, when balance still holds. Time is elongated, almost monumentalised, transforming fragile configurations into icons of persistence. Photography here is aligned with love’s aspiration—endurance, memory, and the desire for stasis. Conversely, video is mercilessly brief. Each clip lasts mere seconds, recording the exact instant of collapse: separation, fall, breakage. These videos are unrepeatable events; once the balance fails, the configuration cannot be restored without becoming another work altogether. Video thus functions as an index of irreversibility, closer to trauma than to narrative. The conceptual intelligence of ULS lies in this split ontology. Photography does not lie; it simply speaks a different temporal truth than video. Together, they expose the medium itself as an ethical agent. Love, the series suggests, is not located in the objects nor in their fall, but in the tension between what is preserved and what is lost. The work becomes a meditation on representation itself—how images promise permanence while reality insists on entropy.

The material lexicon of ULS—tools, food, ornaments, organic remnants—anchors the work in the everyday, but never lapses into the merely symbolic. These objects are not props; they are actors with mass, friction, and resistance. Gravity is the silent co-author of every piece. Unlike classical sculpture, which denies gravity through ideal form, ULS foregrounds it as an ethical force. The collapse is not violent but inevitable. This inevitability situates the work within a broader critique of late-capitalist temporality, where relationships, labour, and attention are structured by acceleration and exhaustion. The insistence on one-to-one pairings resists accumulation and hierarchy; each relationship is singular, unscalable. In this way, the series refuses spectacle and excess, opting instead for seriality as a form of care. The viewer is invited not to consume images rapidly but to recognise repetition as difference. Each fall is unique, each failure specific. The work’s politics are thus quiet but insistent: systems collapse not through catastrophe alone, but through countless small imbalances ignored until gravity intervenes.

Ultimately, Unstable Love Series is less about love as emotion than love as infrastructure. It asks what it means to sustain connection under material and temporal constraints. The work’s discipline—short videos, static images, neutral backgrounds—creates a laboratory of affect where sentiment is stripped of ornament. What remains is a precise articulation of care as effort, balance, and risk. By pairing photography’s long time with video’s instant, ULS proposes a double ethics of attention: to honour what endures without denying what breaks. The viewer is positioned between contemplation and shock, permanence and loss. This oscillation is the work’s true subject. Love, here, is neither romantic nor tragic; it is architectural. It requires support, calibration, and constant renegotiation. When collapse occurs, it is not framed as failure but as evidence. Evidence that balance existed, however briefly. Evidence that connection was attempted. In an era saturated with images yet impoverished in duration, ULS restores seriousness to both media and to the fragile social contracts they mirror.