Body as Destiny: A Fragment in the Work of Alina Shapochnikov

Modern culture is marked by a sense of social, psychological, and mental fragmentation and loss of integrity. It is characterized by a feeling of rupture and disintegration. Strategies for creating new integrity through addressing fragmented bodily forms and rethinking the role of the bodily fragment are revealed through various artistic practices. One vivid example is the work of Polish-Jewish artist Alina Shapochnikova. Throughout her career, spanning from 1945 (the beginning of her artistic education) to 1973 (her death from cancer), the artist created numerous works—from classic charcoal sketches to independent sculptural compositions. This research focuses on the image of the fragmented body and the strategies for its construction in the work of Alina Shapochnikova, an exploration likely connected to the artist's personal traumatic war past, her terminal illness, and reflected in key series of works, including "Bellies," "Herbarium," "Tumors," etc. The methodology of the research is based on a cultural-historical (diachronic) approach, allowing for the tracing of the specificities of the artist's creative path in relation to her biography. Archival digitized notes and manifestos by the artist are used, revealing the ideational content of her works and allowing for assumptions about the validity of the approach taken. A general analysis of the artist's creative strategies showed that addressing the image of the fragmented body through the use of "obsessive repetition" enables the artist to explore themes of trauma, illness, and death in new ways. The rupture, which due to the fragmented bodily form remains unspoken, simultaneously generates a sense of new sensibility and empathy. The fragmented bodily form creates a meaningful flicker, a transgressive transition made by both the viewer and the creator: from a personal imprint to an alienated fragment of what was once a whole bodily form, as seen in the work "Leg" from 1962. Shapochnikova expands traditional methods of working with sculpture through her experiments with material and form, using rubber, newspapers, gauze, and resins. The objects she creates—elements of a new visual vocabulary—are referred to by the artist in her 1972 manifesto as maladroits ("clumsy objects"), thereby emphasizing the special status of alienated (objectified) casts of bodily fragments made at the same time from her own body.

fragment, fragmented body, sculpture, Alina Szapocznikow, pain, trauma, illness, repetition compulsion, cast, maladroits