Rosa Barba makes artworks with film. But you wouldn’t call them movies.

Sometimes she shoots them with 35-millimeter cameras and beams them onto screens. Other times, she turns celluloid and projectors into whirring sculptures, or choreographs musical performances with flickering light.

“Film is kind of the key word,” Barba, 52, said recently. “But, in the end, maybe you can’t say they are films anymore: It’s a film about film, or it’s about the idea of a film.”

Film might be her medium, material or subject, but there are many other ideas in Barba’s works, too — about ecology, landscape, science and the nature of knowledge. All her signature obsessions come together at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from May 3, where an installation of her work, called “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” runs through July 6 in the museum’s Kravis Studio, a space devoted to experimentation.

The presentation brings together 12 works from the last 16 years, with performances on six dates throughout the run, that add up to a statement on her expanded understanding of cinema

“Cinema, for me, is the moment when you start a kind of embarkation,” Barba said in an interview at her Berlin studio. It wasn’t just light, sound, or movement, she said; it was “a chemical reaction” when those elements come together and trigger or unveil something for the viewer — Holland Cotter of The New York Times once described this as an ability “to knock the pins out from under tyrant logic and clear a space where difference can thrive.”