COMING APART AT THE SEAMS

Concrete and Steel Rebar
170 X 30 X 20 cm

The sculpture Coming Apart At The Seams (2023) by Boky Hackel, a multifaceted artist who places at the center of her research not the unity of the body but its recomposed fragmentation, assembled from an steel skeleton hoisted on a concrete base. The body in pieces is the event, in between the air, the split between inner space and whole, appearance and substance in which the void around closes a fragmented form .

The mirror of the self in the severed body indicates fragility, as the essence of the feminine, violated, traversed by the hunger for love and the loss of its identity as a testimony to the impossibility of any completeness. The artist searches, in the fragments of a nude of classical evocation, for the history of women in the fragmentations of the Id, from the lost uniqueness , in which each split is charged with lyrical power in the face of the loss of its centrality in contemporary society.  

It is in the split the loss of the centrality of the work and not in the sinuous concrete body, a new Nike of a post-humanity and polished with beeswax, wingless but with severed arms stretched toward infinity, in which fragmentation and recomposition of individual body pieces becomes a presupposition to recompose a new form, an orgiastic regeneration in which the wholeness of the whole is a concreteness. 

The sculpture becomes a symbol of transformation, a trace of an original wound, evoking the separation of spirit and matter, eroticism and motherhood , seduction and negation, and embodying the excess of life and at the same time the certainty of death of which woman is the bearer, evoking beyond any impossible definition the fragility of the human condition .  She rises vertically this amazon vivisected by life's experiences, engulfed by men and children oozing with the desire for freedom, proud of the heaviness of the shattered body not quite reassembled around pivots as a symbol of constitutive finiteness. These are fragments of a body held together by concrete, condemned to its mortal fate that paradoxically provokes a sense of poignant beauty in its attempt at transcendence. 

Jacqueline Ceresoli, Art Critic