The meeting with Mirosław Bałka hosted by Dorota Jarecka at Gazeta Cafe attracted crowds of people who could barely fit in the cafe. The artist told us about his recent foreign exhibitions. He started from his most recent project Wir sehen Dich, which he realized in Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe. The introduction to his story about the exhibition was a video posted on YouTube – a peculiar comment and a sort of visual documentation of the exhibition. Bałka was given a few rooms to his disposal, altogether about 100m², in which the pearls of German Medieval painting are displayed on a day to day basis, for example, those of the Master of the Karlsruhe Passion. In that context he built a cage in the form of a corridor, which is a recurrent motif in his works. The corridor made of grilles leads through the display areas of Kunsthalle. The onlooker can leave the corridor and approach the paintings, but he can also follow the narration of the artist, challenging the sound of the fans in the cage and the air generated by them. “I’m not only interested in the visual side of a work of art,” said Bałka, “I lead the onlooker to an experience. Life is a sort of corridor, we always see only its fragments,” continued the artist, “We have a greater awareness of this fragmentation due to the element of the grille element that I introduced. During the meeting the theme of experiencing art often came up, also in the context of the realisation of How it is in the famous Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern, where Balka was the first Pole who had the opportunity of presenting his work. “This piece and that place absorbed me,” said the artist, “I didn’t expect the London exhibition to cost me so much energy.” In answer to Dorota Jarecka’s question about the reception of the project he admitted that many texts were written about it and that they were all enthusiastic, however, some were on the border of understanding. The piece, as Jarecka rightly noticed, was dominated by the theme of historical trauma, whilst the concept of creating a gallery within a gallery and giving the spectator a chance to experience and associate with the museum and art were less important. “The spectator brings himself,” said Bałka, turning our attention to the multiplicity of interpretations that are possible due to the different feelings, views, fascinations and knowledge of the spectators. The artist also mentioned Zbigniew Bauman’s interesting interpretation of the piece, who wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition that in the darkness of How it is spectators have a chance of “connecting”, uniting. Mirosław Bałka and Dorota Jarecka also talked about the artist’s project from last year – the sculpture titled Auschwitzwieliczka. They touched on the topic of the light projection, which appeared and disappeared through a sign cut out in the ceiling, and which also looks completely different in different seasons, times of day and hours. “Wiktor Zin, my dad’s favourite artist, once lived in an apartment above Niepodległości Square. I regret very much that he was unable to see my sculpture from that perspective,” admitted Bałka. Whilst commenting on the possibility of moving Auschwitzwieliczka in the future to the surroundings of the train station in Zabłocie, the artist noted that local residents had got used to the piece and in a new place the sculpture would arise in a wider context, and the theme of the compression of two places, Wieliczka and Auschwitz, which are treated superficially as tourist attractions, will be more visible. These are just a few of the topics touched on during the meeting. The conversation also covered the tradition of Polish monuments, breath in art, and also the problem of valuing and judging it. The host of the meeting and the artist received a loud applause at the end.