Fossils of the sensory evolution of the social body

This series of plaster sculptures result from several months of collaboration between the artist Olesja Katšanovskaja-Münd, Tallinn-based choreographer and dance artist Karolin Poska, and dance movement and somatics therapist Alexey Rezenkov from St. Petersburg, who contributed remotely. Karolin has brought her experience of dance to the project, and together with Olesja, they have used clay as a connective mesh to bring together inner thoughts with movement. From afar, Alexey has lent his voice and knowledge of body self-awareness, moving together with Olesja and Karolin to highlight diverse body shapes and positions that reveal different mental states, somatic reactions, and intense feelings. 

Monumentalizing the body’s parts by extending its actual limit physically and psychically and conceptually and perceptually, the series of sculptures produce a visualization of trauma resulting from isolation and stagnation. The fragments that assert the whole’s incompleteness on display take the viewer into the social body. The works created by the artists’ bodies play within and beyond the context of gender construction while transforming the body inside out can be read as a metaphor for trauma. These fragments serve to visualize and re-aware for the viewer their bodies in the gallery’s surrounding space, encouraging a post-traumatic identity to begin to emerge.