Broken Femur

The exhibition of Šárka Koudelová and Gideon Horváth is based on an almost mythical statement by anthropologist Margaret Mead. When she was asked by students what she considered the first sign of civilization, she allegedly replied that the healing of a broken human femur. In nature, it's usually true that if you break your leg, you die. You can't run from danger, you're unable to get to a source of water or hunt for food. Koudelová and Horváth understand the theme of the exhibition as a call for a change in social dogmas. They hear in it a call to break the femur of this society and to heal it together. The conversation between Šárka Koudelová, Gideon Horváth, and Piotr Sikora took place on 26 April 2024 on the occasion of the Broken Femur exhibition held at Pragovka Gallery. Piotr Sikora: Is failure, mistake, or malfunction a part of your art in any way? I'm thinking about practical things but also theoretical assumptions. What happens when you make a mistake? Šárka Koudelová: I often come across the opinion that my art is very well-planned and almost mathematically calculated. It's not true. However, I certainly have a lot of control over my creative methods even though I invented them to resemble natural processes. In my second year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, I started to paint my collection of minerals which I had had since childhood. I felt stuck and didn't know what to do. Formally, these layers came from this moment when I was trying to imitate geological processes. It was satisfying that I found a way to record time in my paintings. P: So, what is the failure you are afraid of? Is it a technical failure or something else? Š: I don't know. That's the question. Maybe what I’m doing is not authentic. I will look back and realize this wasn’t what I wanted to achieve. Whenever I try to incorporate something more expressive into my work, I fail. One time I allowed myself to fail and be expressive, we made a series of paintings with my son. I let him draw and paint with me and, eventually, I created these marble windows around his sketches, which was therapeutic. Those are symbolic images of parenting to me—creating a frame, a protection, a window for my child. P: Gideon, how about you? How about failure? Because in your case, it's even more delicate when it comes to the wax matter you are working with. Gideon Horváth: In my case, I have to accept that I won’t be able to immortalize my work in the usual artistic sense. So, the material has its agency. Even after you are done with the piece, you cannot be sure how it will change with time. When I started working with wax, I felt that I was not an omnipotent artist. If I don't like the work or even if I like it but don't want to keep it, I can melt it and create a new work from the same material. This fact was freeing because when I started working with it, I had never studied sculpting and it was a completely autodidactic journey, and still is. Regarding failure, I think there is a huge pressure on many artists that you have to produce immaculate masterpiece all the time. If something is not living up to that standard, then you shouldn't even show it to the public. I think that's such a problematic way of thinking. When I look back at what I've exhibited in recent years, I see this journey from A to B to C. It was a completely public story of imperfection, struggling, getting it right, then failing and trying again. Everyone wants to be successful but I think success is in many ways boring. Failure is much more exciting and interesting. It's such a complicated and dark and ambivalent notion. There is a book by Jack Halberstam called The Queer Art of Failure, which is very important to me. Jack, the transgender philosopher, writes about how you can criticize the heteronormative, capitalist, patriarchal society using failure. Instead of committing to success, you highlight the process which is often based on failure. To me, it is an amazing way of hijacking the progress-oriented system and making it more amiable. I'm inspired by that. P: Still, in order to be able to share your mistakes, you need to have some kind of exposure. So, in the end, visibility is already a success. Allowing yourself to fail is a kind of a privilege. G: Certainly. Then, we enter the topic of authenticity. When you fail and you are not afraid of it, it allows you to keep on going. When you fail to be truly authentic or yourself, that's a different thing for me. It is important not to follow blindly certain expectations. To remain true to the artistic process. As for the topic of success in our field of work, speaking for myself, I reflect on success which I didn’t necessarily have a few years ago. Š: But could you specify what you understand as success? Is it about visibility or recognition? G: For me, one of its aspects is the privilege to be able to make your work visible, to be able to sell your works and make money from your art instead of having several jobs on the side. It is also a fragile place to be because we are always scared that it is going to change. Š: I think this is extremely personal. Not to mention in the era of social media, it’s easy to create a resemblance of success when you are barely hanging on. It happened to me several times that people, young female artists especially, approached me with compliments on how I manage my art career while being a mother and working as a curator. I want to say it’s not true—it's Instagram. Of course, I don’t post all the chaotic moments from my home, how messy everything is, all the night shifts. Though, I feel the responsibility to say it’s not as bright as it might seem. It's not easy; frankly, sometimes it's terrible. There's a huge misunderstanding coming from the post-capitalistic way we understand success. G: That’s why we should call for breaking the femur—leaving the paradigm, to be able to relearn the notion of success and failure. P: Have you ever broken anything? Š: I think I broke my hand twice, both of my hands, actually. One time, it was my left hand and then it was my right hand. I was little, like between eight and twelve or something like that. But nothing else. P: Was it traumatic? Do you still have a memory of the pain and your healing process? Š: In both cases, it came by surprise. So, the first time I was dancing, we were around a campfire in a friend's garden. It was dark and I fell and broke my left hand. The day after, we were travelling with my mom and my sisters, it was super hot, and it started to hurt during the journey. It was very adventurous. We had to find somebody with a car to take us to the hospital. Then, we found out I had it broken and they put a cast on it. It was in the middle of summer, and I was not allowed to swim. The second time, it was winter, and we were playing in the snow with my sister and some friends, and we had a sleigh crash. She fell on me, and I broke the bone in my hand. It was during the Christmas holiday; we had a lot of school tasks to do. Thankfully, I was liberated from that. P: Gideon, did you ever break anything? G: My heart (laughter). Not really. I dislocated my shoulders several times and they have never really recovered, so they should be operated on, which I’m not a big fan of. Once, I dislocated my right shoulder and it was extremely painful because, normally, it just jumps back into its place. But that time, it was out and higher up. I had to lean against the wall to keep it in place. I waited almost 2 hours for the ambulance. I was crying, the pain was so awful. The ambulance couldn't get into the street due to Erdogan’s visit to Budapest. Since then, I have dislocated my arm again this year. I have been attending physiotherapy ever since. I enjoy these sessions when they touch you in a very delicate way and it hurts so much that you clench your teeth and grab the bed. I started to learn to accept the pain. To be aware that the pain is coming and try to disassociate from the pain and just look at it like this strange, puzzling phenomenon. Not to be so alarmed, not to panic but to accept that it's going to hurt and it's fine, it's not a bad thing. P: And when you dislocated your arm recently, did some memories from the first dislocation hit you? G: The first time I dislocated my shoulder, I was in school. I was twelve years old. It happened during a basketball game. I was very tall already, and I jumped. It was me jumping up for the ball at the start of the game. The force of catching the ball just dislocated my shoulder. The last time it happened, it was one of those strange winter days when rain freezes on the ground. I fell on my shoulder and I just heard it cracking and I felt this immense pain, but I wasn't sure what happened, so I stood up. This lady was walking her dog, and she was asking me if I was all right, and I didn't know what to answer her. I felt this urge to reassure her that I was okay even though I was not sure if I actually was. That's a recurring thing—that I want to reassure my surroundings that I am fine when, in fact, I don't know if I'm fine. P: Yeah, I know this feeling. Instead of taking a moment for yourself, you are instantly trying to please others or not to make a scene. G: I'm afraid of falling in general. Maybe because I'm so tall. When I do fall, and I don’t know if I’m hurt, the best would be just to take a moment to lay there. P: Yes! Š: Maybe speaking about this kind of strange feeling about reassuring everyone around that you are fine—I have a strong memory connected to an injury. It was not about breaking any bones, but it was kind of similar because when I was 14, I suffered a brain concussion. I fainted for 20 minutes. The first thing I can remember is that I was saying, "It's fine, it's fine," multiple times, because I didn’t realize that I just said that. The people around me were asking me not to repeat it as they could see that the situation was kind of dramatic. Eventually, I was taken to the hospital. I do remember this urge—to reassure everyone I’m fine. I’m asking myself why. When something bad happens to you, the first impulse is to calm everybody down. G: Both of you have kids, and I'm just wondering whether this notion is linked to the fact that as a kid you are often told to calm down whenever something happens to you. P: You are right. I think it's important to make a kid aware that you are actually interested in the source of their cry or pain. When something bad happens to my sons, I try to acknowledge it rather than patronizing them. To address it and recognize it. Š: I agree. It is crucial to allow your children to cry and feel bad—to create a space for those feelings and to know that it is fine to feel them. G: Maybe that's a generational thing as well. Our parents are the “It's okay, don't worry about it,” “It's going to be fine” generation. The optimistic nineties parents. As we are living within crises, we are more used to saying “It hurts, it hurts, it's okay, it hurts.” P: In what way can your art be a part of the healing process? And why do you think art, in particular, takes on this role related to recovery, healing, and mending? Š: It's still surprising, even to myself, that I believe any art has the capacity to make any change. But on the other hand, I'm very skeptical about the effectiveness of the contemporary art scene. I'm wondering whether it's possible to think of the healing process as something psychosomatic or rather metaphorical. P: Should art be about making yourself feel better, which is already some kind of a healing process, or should it rather push you toward this conundrum of problems? Š: I believe it's somehow connected. Sometimes you choose to be gentle and caring, and other times, you need to be very pushy, critical, even unpleasant. I think art can do both. Not just art, but also the art scene which represents it. The whole process of making exhibitions relies on the fact that you are caring, gentle, and full of empathy. For me, and I guess also for Gideon, it is very much connected to the formal side of the exhibitions and artworks. On the other side, I also believe that when the moment arises, you have to be expressive and radical—that's what we were referring to when speaking of “breaking the collective femur” in our statement. When gentle methods fail and there is no space for diplomacy, it’s better to break something and allow it to heal. P: But don't you think something like that already happened in 2020? The pandemic was like a bonebreaker. For me, the very idea of degrowth was fostered throughout this period. Even though things went back to “normal”, if not worse, the fact that we are deliberating themes such as degrowth, change of the paradigm, and solutions to other crises, I find positive. G: I don’t think any exhibition can take up a whole societal problem or crisis. But the breaking of the bone is exciting in a metaphorical sense. When I think of the healing power of art, I think of all of those artworks that I encountered throughout my life that were liberating, cathartic, and euphoric. But the artworks that have had the longest-lasting effect on me were not necessarily pleasing or evoking good feelings. Those were often bold and “bad” pieces that, in a way, hurt me. As we are speaking about healing and care, I would like to address the psychological side of these processes. What is thrilling for me in art is that I can recognize a feeling or an emotion that I experienced in my childhood a very long time ago and connect it with a present. The connecting element would be art—Tarkovsky’s films or paintings by Bacon I saw many years ago. In his case, it was hard to look at his paintings of his lover, hard and liberating at the same time. It was healing in a way to look the pain in the eyes and then move on. So, I think that for me, breaking the bone, in a way, is being able to experience pain and then also experience the joy of resilience, the joy of survival, which comes afterwards. P: So, I guess it's not about breaking one massive femur, but many small ones.