HOC ES CORPUS MEUM

Pavel Kovach’s project emerges at the intersection of two realities: art and the direct experience of war. The artist, who is currently performing military service, works with materials directly connected to the front line: artefacts, documents, and belongings of the fallen, the wounded, and the missing. In his works, art serves as a tool to document and symbolically structure traumatic experiences. The exhibition title evokes a passage from the Eucharistic Prayer, ‘This is my body’, whose popular-culture travesty – ‘hocus-pocus’ – is recognised as a magical spell. In this context, the question of the agency of language and image arises: can art change anything, or is it merely a symbolic gesture in the face of the real experience of violence and loss? The minimalist, often conceptual form of the works contrasts with their semantic weight. One of the installations, created from casts of the actual insoles of fallen soldiers, forms a map of scattered burial sites and a symbolic gesture of renewed ‘gathering’ of split bodies. Untitled installation (Bay leaf) rewrites the symbol of triumph into the statistics of war losses through casualty notification numbers. In other works, the artist uses elements of wartime reality such as glass shards left after explosions, items from military posts, or materials documenting loss. An important strand of the exhibition is the tension between document and metaphor. Installations containing soil, water, salt, or wax examine how time and memory operate, while performances reveal the author’s double identity – soldier and artist. The exhibition becomes both an archive and a symbolic monument in which the materiality of everyday things preserves a record of the experience of violence, loss, and memory. curator: Paweł Korbus exhibition architecture: Bogdana Kosmina