Four Sculptures in Fifteen Pieces

‘Four Sculptures in Fifteen Pieces’:
A Significative And Contemplative Act Of Attention by Ramiro Camelo

In Donald Barthelme’s short story “See the Moon?” the narrator, a writer who wanted to be a painter, maintains a series of souvenirs pinned to a wall. He hopes they will someday merge, blur, cohere is the word, maybe into something, a meaningful whole. Barthelme affirms of him, “Fragments are the only forms he trusts”. In today’s social life where almost everything is mediated by technology or social media, we tend to believe our life might be fractured or incomplete, then is stimulating to the mind to imagine what might have been, or could be, in the slippery human quest for certainty and completeness, we fantasise in putting all the puzzle fragments together.

The word fragment “a small piece or part,” derives from Latin fragmentum “a fragment, remnant,” literally “a piece broken off,” from base of frangere “to break”. A fragment is a piece of a whole which might be torn, shattered or severed, in some manner fragmentation, therefore, implies continued violence towards enforced disintegration. Fragmentariness many times is associated with loss, absence and dislocation. Fragmentation in a broad sense relates to the action of splitting, the separation of the whole and even causing ‘the wound’.

Is therefore logical that artists that deal with issues of collective traumas decide to recreate enactments of fragmentation, dislocation and destruction will find the museum as an ideal repository. The historic museum is both the storehouse and the locus of transmission for a culture, a container for collective consciousness, a physical space of stored memory, a contact zone for contextualising recreations and enactments from and towards the past and present. All those functions and roles of the museum might be identified in Jonna Kina’s “Four Sculptures in Fifteen Pieces”, (2022) a short film shooted in 35 mm with a single horizontal slow panning movement starting with a museum conservator examining one of the sculptures and following with all the sculpture fragments lined on a museum table. The sculpture pieces are originally from four different classical marble sculptures by Amandus Adamson (1855- 1929) and August Weizenberg (1837-1921) two prominent Estonian artists who Kina has been studying their bodies of works since 2019.

The sculpture fragments are surviving pieces rescued from the ruins of an Art Museum of Estonia destroyed during the bombing of the city of Tallinn on 9 March 1944, the Soviet Air Forces started to bomb the Estonian capital, which, at the time, was occupied by Nazi Germany; is calculated that 600-700 civilians died and over 600 were wounded and some 20,000 people were left homeless. The March Bombing destroyed one-third of the Tallinn area, and dozens of similar raids against Estonian cities in the area that would later become part of the USSR, known as the Eastern Bloc, are seen today as evidence of the USSR’s ruthless strategy to destroy the morale of the Estonian society and pave the way for occupation and forced annexation.

Kina’s film is an ideal example of how contemporary artists can construct new interpretations by focusing on particular artworks in a museum collection to bring to life meditated visual narratives. Furthermore, in a museal environment, it explores the potential of historical artwork’s openness to enquiry and so forth to produce renewed lectures and new meanings. The artist’s fervent attention evokes a heightened sense of the fragmented historical narratives that those sculpture pieces hold. She is aware that the pieces are in a status of transitional form, they are not being exhibited, they are not in storage, and they are in a particular suspension state where they are subject to legitimation through practices or acts of attention, as aesthetic experience and method of inquiry theorized by Michelle Henning.

“Museums validate certain practices of attention and devalue others. In turn, these practices of attention validate the objects held in museums. Indeed, museum objects, in order to retain their value, must be repeatedly legitimated through acts of attention. Competing interpretations and value judgements within the museums and the disciplines re-evaluate and reinforce the canons of valued objects, devaluing some, newly valuing others, while leaving a relatively stable core of agreed value. In this way the value of museum objects and modes of attention mutually reinforce one another… Through appropriate acts of attention, the quality of an artwork supposedly reveals itself.”

In the film, Kina’s ‘practice of attention is a perfectly studied lineal mise-en-scène, matched with a spotless single shoot that might be perceived as a travel back in time, a subtle feeling of being drawn to the past and imagining how the broken pieces were rescued from the rubble after the bombing, or staying in the present to empathizing with the museum’s restorer enigma of which isolated part belongs to, —because at the end a fragment is visually on the move since one’s mind tend always in the mission of completing it—. Ultimately, when we are captivated by physical fragments of the past and what stays incomplete. If lack of unity becomes a paradoxical starting point, Friedrich Schlegel’s aphorism deems to be relevant: “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.”

– Ramiro Camelo, curator