Martin Arnold

• CAC Vilnius, Vilnius (LT)
• 04.04.–31.12.2025

Breaking the Joints is a group exhibition and event programme that considers the status of the body within the history of animation, elaborating on the essential concepts of cartoons, while also examining what these modes of world-building can tell us about our world today.

Back in the 1930s, animators were faced with a problem: the rubber-hose style of rendering bodies in motion was too fluid, abstracted, and without physical structure, while rotoscoping – the practice of tracing over live-action footage – resulted in rigid mechanical movements without vitality. The Disney animator and labour rights activist Art Babbitt came up with a solution: to give force, flexibility, and believability to animated bodies, one must successively ‘break their joints’. Indeed, they discovered that to give characters flesh and bone, solidity and weight, they had to disfigure their anatomy. This method suggests a certain violence and trauma at the heart of the cartoon world, but also a pliability and plasticity of the body and matter itself, demonstrating a counter-intuitive principle that animated realism requires a bending of physical laws.

Artists: Gabrielė Adomaitytė, Ed Atkins, Martin Arnold, Catherine Biocca, Aline Bouvy, Barry Doupé, Peter Frederiksen, Özgür Kar, Tomasz Kowalski, Oliver Laric, Ebecho Muslimova, Nadia Naveau, Agnieszka Polska, Jani Ruscica, Mateusz Sadowski, Gary Simmons, Viktor Timofeev, Theo Triantafyllidis

Curators: Post Brothers, Edgaras Gerasimovičius

Assistant curator: Povilas Gumbis

CAC Vilnius