Cavities. Dialogues with Viewers

– Why don’t they have arms?

– Because I want to show how there are losses where everything that is not attached to the body (in Ukrainian korpus, from the Latin corpus, meaning “body, a complete whole”) suffers. This is also a nod to the corpus of ancient sculptures in museums, many of which are missing arms and sometimes heads. If their bodies have retained some of their organs despite the passage of time, then this is the result of those organs joining the bulk of the torso to create a monolithic form. Or they became an extension of the body’s overall movement, as if part of a unified military corps.

– Still, why are we looking at parts of bodies? Is this a reference to combat trauma? To the battlefield, where the fragments of what should be whole suggest crying and wounds?

– Actually I was thinking about the connection between the German Trauma (physical or mental wound) and Traum (dream). I was reflecting on the horrors of war that the lethargic mind would rather view as a kind of natural disaster, and also the immersive theater of dreams, where the sleeper’s deeds are freed from moral principles. In other words, when I show that these fragments of bodies belong to what is human or living, I am simultaneously employing a metaphor and speaking literally. It’s true that war has the power to take lives or tear bodies into pieces, but it also asks questions—those questions that are so tempting to put off answering in times of peace.

– Okay, but is this an eye or an opening here? You also have rooms where an eye looks in from outside. Could that symbolize a way out?

– After I saw the gas chambers at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, I spent a long time thinking about how I was looking at these rooms—terrifying in their utter emptiness—through a peephole in the door, from the perspective of a guard, as we were not allowed to enter. But it was precisely being in this illusory position of an observer, seemingly in control of the situation, that revealed the obvious: how easy it would be to end up inside. It’s as if you are outside, looking in, without realizing that you are actually looking at yourself. Recovering the strength to look your fear in the eye may be a way out of this enclosed emptiness.

– And still, these holes . . .

– Yes, these cavities. You can’t separate a whole into its parts. That’s why an orderly dismemberment makes a person resemble a doll, which is usually constructed with the ability to imitate [human] movement in mind. At the Bode-Museum in Berlin, the expertly crafted dolls are easy to differentiate from the sculptures through their artificial-looking poses. If we also recall the dance with the doll from Fellini’s Casanova, we can approximate a rhyme between the imitation of normality, the amorality of actions in a dream, and the loss or trauma that results from replacing life with procedures or algorithms. In theory, the torsos of ancient sculptures (missing arms, heads or legs) should be similar to dolls or people wounded in combat, but they actually preserve the power of a whole body.

In addition, I would like these bodies with cavities to remind viewers of Adam’s head, this repository of the mind of the first human, which is less a symbol of mortality than of courage in the face of death and life.

Vlada Ralko, May 2025, Berlin, Frohnau

(Translated from Ukrainian into English by Larissa Babij)

                                                                                                                                                                                           

Created at the a_brucke residence from the Yurii Stashkiv Foundation Chervonechorne