Defragmentations

While the previous works play out at the level of the microstructure, it is at a higher level, that of the fragment, of the patch, that Adieu, Corpus ! (2018) by Oleksandr Isaienko and No way forward, no way back (2023) by Maciek Stępniewski unfold. In the latter, the landscape (natural, urban), the central subject, is subjected to permanent transformations punctuated by the irruption and disappearance of fragments of images and images of objects. Sometimes screen-printed, often “glitched,” these disruptive fragments, of an uncertain fixity, prevent the emergence of a stable identity for an ever-changing landscape. The work problematizes Nature in its links with culture and technics, from a dispassionate and timeless perspective: the resulting dynamic collage describes a forever unresolved dialectic, within a system haunted by a pulsation that makes it organic. In Adieu Corpus !, it is the human body that is subjected to a constant, rhythmic “refragmentation” that denatures it, but not completely. This troubled body, the victim of an ailment that ends up carrying it off, moves through an austere territory punctuated by the traces it obstinately scrutinizes, until its ultimate exhaustion. It is a body that is not only territorialized but seeks to merge with the territory, in the probable hope of curing an acute form of disorientation. This disorientation, without remedy, ends up affecting the whole of the territory in this 2018 work, which foreshadows the scale of the conflict that was to strike Ukraine, the artist’s country of origin.