In the performance Piruet, Ewa Partum presents the female body through a radical gesture. The naked artist steps onto the surface of a mirror, spins around her own axis, and shatters the glass with a powerful kick. It is a threshold moment – between movement and stillness, beauty and destruction, image and body. In this way, Partum rejects the aesthetic ideal of the female body as harmonious and controlled. Her pirouette is not a dance movement, but an act of resistance in which the body reclaims its power by destroying the image that has defined it.
This performance takes on a particular significance for Joanna Pawlik in the context of her own experience. As a result of an accident involving shattered glass, her leg – the same leg on which she had trained in figure skating for years – was severely injured and later amputated. The act of breaking the mirror in Piruet therefore becomes not only a metaphor, but also connects with a real experience of rupture: a moment in which the body loses its previous form and, along with it, its former experience of movement, balance, and bodily identity.
In both cases, glass functions as a boundary: between the body and its reflection, between image and reality, between what the body remembers and what no longer exists. In Partum’s performance, the mirror becomes a tool of emancipation, and its destruction represents a liberation from the image of woman as a reflection of the male gaze. In Pawlik’s experience, glass becomes a point of transition: from a body that knew movement and control to a body that must redefine itself.
Partum shatters the surface of the image in Piruet; Pawlik carries its fragment within her. In both cases, the body becomes a site of crisis and transformation. For Partum, it was a rebellion against the culture of representation; for Pawlik, it marks a moment in which presence takes on a different meaning. The body is no longer an image to be looked at, but a testimony to endurance, a memory of movement, and a trace of a boundary that has been crossed.
Working today with her body after amputation, Pawlik continues a dialogue with Partum – not by repeating her gesture, but by rewriting it through her own body. She is interested in the moment when movement becomes possible despite limitations, and when balance emerges from loss.
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