Fingerlessness — Sasha Slepchuk

Fingerlessness — Multimedia installation, November 2024

Tracing paper, gypsum, wooden plate, glass, steel, animation, video.
Size: 180/ 380 cm.
Duration: 3 min., 4min.

Veins leading from the heart, broken lines going nowhere. Destruction and disappearance are an integral part of the human experience. The symbolism of statues, where every loss, every broken finger is a farewell to the idealization of oneself. It is the interaction of time and ambition.

Each loss is a dialogue with history, whether it is the hand of the Nika of Samothrace and her lost fingers or the chipped noses in Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect — an act of deconstruction and loss of identity, with greatness crumbling under the pressure of time. The inevitable cycle of civilizations doomed to oblivion. In the broken forms of decaying statues, human fears are reflected; in shattered stone, a person is vulnerable, temporary, and incomplete. The absence of a nose is the loss of a face, the absence of fingers is the loss of power, the absence of history is the loss of meaning.

The inability to look at both screens at the same time embodies the fragmentation of perception, time, memory, and experience. A person can only see one side — one story — and is forced to remember elements of the other, creating an illusion of completeness that is always incomplete. Tracing paper was chosen as the material so that the images could slightly seep through each other, like memories, where one moment overlaps with another. These memories are distorted, like light passing through tracing paper — light, elusive, and gradually fading.

Fingerlessness project was a part of Artist Residency at MeMeraki, Cyprus. Open studio took place in October 2024 followed by final exhibition in November.