Pawel Anaszkiewicz
CRUTCHES OF TIME, 2013
The time is out of joint: Oh cursed spight,
That ever I was born to set it right.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
CRUTCHES OF TIME consists of a silent video in loop shown on the TV screen suspended on crutches. On the screen, placed in the vertical position, we see a video, recorded by the patient who learns to walk after orthopaedic surgery.
In 2013 I underwent a series of surgeries for the implementations of the prosthesis of both of my hip joints. Afterwards of each operation I was recovering in the orthopaedic clinic doing exercises and learning how to walk again. I took advantage of this experience by producing the video-object titled CRUTCHES OF TIME. My intention was to create a piece with an allegorical approach, with the subject of time in convalescence after being dislocated. The time of the crisis, which imposes a new rhythm and in turn dislodges the present time from its natural place and brings us face to face with the future.
Jaques Derrida in his text Time out of joint presents the process of fracture of the internal time as a Hamlet´s source of madness. In the same article he shows the therapeutic function of art in healing the open wounds of our internal time caused today by the processes of constant ruptures and suspensions.
This video-object was presented in one-man show Convalescence of Time, during the Festival of Urban Interventions NARRATIVES 5 (Spiż7 Gallery, Gdañsk, Poland, 2013) and in the collective exhibition SPIN_VIDEO mexican art of video (Double Room Gallery, Trieste, Italy, 2014).