My broken bones

Yehor Antsyhin’s work “My Broken Bones” consists of two elements – an object representing a rescaled human bone, and a video screening with a picture of a group of people watching the city landscape. The relationship between the film and the sculpture is inapparent, which reveals the meaning of the work. The bone, which is made out of clay (that can be treated as earth) has a protrusion, which is a trace of the fracture. This protrusion is a sign, a testimony of the individual story of a specific person, as well as a statement of the fact of the fragility of the human body and the fear of pain. It is worth mentioning that the author of the sculpture made reference to his own personal experience by making an enlarged copy of his own rib that was once broken and is now healed. Thus, starting from the body as a place, an area of shared experience, the artist at the same time clearly defines the limits of empathy. Pain cannot be communicated, just like it cannot be told about when it happens. Pain is an abstraction, encapsulated here in the form of bumps on the smooth surface of clay. Just like the sculpture, the video combines the individuality of human experience with the collective experience and contains personal threads. In the video, several people – privately friends of the artist – observe from a place of particular importance to the author of the work the landscape of Kyiv – a city that resisted Russian aggression with all its might and is for us today a symbol of strength, will to fight and sacrifice. Each person standing on a Kyiv hill on this windy day and observing the buildings in the background, experiences the landscape inside themselves, looking at the city through the lens of personal experience. As outsiders, we join the onlookers in the art gallery and view Kyiv – intimate and neutral at the same time – from behind them. We know nothing about the onlookers themselves, nor do we know anything about the circumstances in which the artist experienced the fracture of his bone.

By juxtaposing, in the context of the war in Ukraine, the image of a healed bone and the landscape of Kyiv contemplated together by a group of young people, Antsyhin connects a personal story with the fate of his loved ones and his nation. Using the concept of landscape as a human partner – a screen and projector of human emotions and experiences, he emphasises the importance of community, the collectivity of experiences and their absolute value for the construction of meaning – identity, understanding and memory. At the same time, the artist emphasises the uniqueness of the individual experience: “My Broken Bones”, however, deals not only with the individual’s relationship with others and the outside world, but also with events that irreversibly change us and our perception of reality. The power of war trauma is revealed at the interface between what we can see and talk about and what we do not recognise. The formal restraint of the means, the steadiness of the sculpture, the calmness and composure emanating from the film build the frame of a project, devoid of pathos, in which the banal harmonises with the tragic. Those looking at Kyiv in the film define the present, update the landscape in front of them as a living companion, shatter the steadiness of the sculpture as something purely conventional causing the healed bone to crack, hurt, heal and scar over again and again.

curator Magdalena Linkowska

I have broken my bones many times, and the last time I fell off my bike I broke my ribs and collarbone for the first time in my life. As this injury was healing, I was suffering from severe chest pain for a long time, although a fracture is supposed to heal over time. After contacting my doctor, I found out that as the bone grows, a calloused flesh appears around it, the diameter of which is larger than the bone itself. Although the bone itself has already set, the process of getting used to the new body shape may take much longer than the tissue knitting together. These natural processes in my body resemble the rules of memory. A build-up of symbols and meanings forms around a painful experience, and a person is no longer influenced by the event itself, but by what forms around it. Over time, the organism becomes accustomed to the new shape and no longer reacts to this growth that has appeared around the fracture. The callus will become rough and hard as bone, and the wound itself will become inaccessible over time as the broken bone and everything around it forms a firm body of experience.

Galery Labirynt 2023  Lublin Poland