Crumbled, flattened, dejected, elevated: the argentine form of a disused juice box in artist Inna Smolina’s sculpture December 23rd, 2021, 10:00pm, During Sex, marks in aluminum the interface of the body, subjectivity, and desire, whilst also acting as a cypher of great physical and psychic pain. The dejected monument renders memory material, as an index, or even ‘counterindex’, of survival. The work represents the aftermath of an excruciating hypoglycemic event (low blood sugar, to which the readily biologically available juice acts an antidote), subjectively felt like a poisoning, objectively brought on by the very same therapy which is meant to save the artist’s life: insulin. Yet while poisoned, she continues.
Born in the Urals and educated in New York, Inna Smolina reveals a multi-media oeuvre, composed predominantly of sculpture and photography, and proposes a highly personal inquiry, using memory as a material and signifying substance. As a type one diabetic1 who has lived her entire adult life compromised by an autoimmune disease, which while invisible is also often a debilitating disability, even permanently damaging her sight, Smolina seeks a(n) (impossible) relation to her own somatic experience, through a body which she cannot help but experience as rent, damaged, faltering and not entirely available to the subjectivity—even the desire—with which it is yet filled.
Smolina’s oeuvre reflects a state of fundamental precarity, ambiguity, abjection—and survival. Composed in both quotidian aluminum and ennobling bronze, Smolina’s practice lionizes detritus, elevating it to the level of sculpture. Such glorification enacts a dejected monumentalization; while the monument externalizes collective memory, apotheosizing perceived virtue, consoling the victors as to the value of war, solidifying a unified vision of the past, Smolina’s sculptural juice boxes, as well as her photographic work, reflect an effort to externalize the recollection of individual somatic experience, not in terms of the heroic but its opposite. These indices of the ipseity of survival suggest what James E Young calls a ‘counterindex’—a counter to the extra-temporal celebratory aesthetics of the monument—no longer graciously accepting the mantle of memory, but rather throwing it back at the spectator’s feet.2
As artifacts as of pain, Smolina’s works seek to navigate, “an interplay between rejection, dejection, and abjection.” She elucidates,
I refuse to present the body as complete or easily understood because it never can be. I can barely understand my own body and its needs, let alone expect anyone else to fully see or understand me—although I long for that. This inability to be fully seen leads to a sense of rejection, which then gives way to dejection. The juice box, as detritus that I elevate, becomes a way to expose the emotional weight of living with a body that feels both essential and alien.3
This resulting tension—not only between essence and alienation but also between rejection and reverence, autonomy and dependence, absence and presence—exposes the ambiguity of the abjection at the heart of the artist’s work. It is a state of perpetual danger. As Julia Kristeva writes in The Powers of Horror, “Abjection is, above all, ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it […] on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”4 It is a forfeited existence, in bronze. As Smolina states, “Through these objects and fragmented forms, I explore how one feels both sustained by and estranged from its own physicality. […] The crumpled shape of the juice box, now frozen in metal, speaks to both the vulnerability of the body and the moments in which something as simple as a juice box becomes pivotal in maintaining life.”
This precarious and quotidian quest for survival, for many type-one diabetics, also means in material terms, that they are intensely intertwined with a menagerie of technological supports, all of which allow the patient to act in the place of their failed hormonal system. In the photographic work, Cyborg, Smolina presents a self-portrait: her own body curls in upon itself, only her elegant back and spine are revealed to the viewer. She threatens to disappear. Yet, what is important in the image is not simply what is withheld—the countenance of the artist—but what is revealed: two pieces of technology attached to her body. This is not the theoretical but literal form of being to which her title makes explicit reference: her existence as cyborg, or an individual reliant upon the essential integration of technological systems within their biology. Or, as Donna Haraway defines, a “chimera […] fabricated hybrid of machine and organism”5. Whilst metaphor fails here, her body, the body of the artist photographed, the body as both corps and corpse, brings new life to Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, stripped of vengeance, straining for survival. Indeed, Smolina’s oeuvre can be seen as a kind of sensitive and intensely personal ‘cyborg writing’, which as Haraway suggests is “about the power to survive […] seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”6 This ‘cyborg storytelling’ however, as Smolina defines it, also manifests the subject’s constant threat of disappearance, as tilting over the void between subject and object, absence and presence, life and death, memory and forgetting. Ever seeking the solace of an impossible intimacy, refuge, desire, through a never-ending onslaught of interruptions, explanations, needles, pain, medicines, mechanisms—and yes, juice boxes.
It is the exploration of a sublime alienation. Sublimely, never to be wished.
Brooke Lynn McGowan, 2025
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1 Also called insulin dependent or juvenile onset diabetes, it is an auto immune condition in which otherwise young healthy individuals bodies betray them, attacking the insulin producing islet cells of the pancreas, making them unable to produce insulin. Prior to insulin therapy, T1D, as it is abbreviated, was a death sentence.
2 See James E Young. The Textures of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993; James E Young. At Memory’s Edge: After images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000; and James E Young, “The Counter Monument” in Critical Inquiry 18 (1992).
3 This and all further comments from the artists are from an interview performed by email. Oct/Nov 2024.
4 See Julia Kristeva. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982: p 9.
5 See Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto” in Manifestly Haraway. St Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook.
6 Ibid.