The Site Specific sculpture by one of the most outstanding contemporary sculptors, Mirosław Bałka, will inaugurate the Trickster 2011 project, accompanying the European Culture Congress in Wrocław (08/09/11 – 11/09/11). The sculpture will be put up in the western wing of the Pawilon Czterech Kopuł (pavilion of the four domes), which was built between 1912 and 1913 to a design by German modernist Hans Poelzig. Agata Siwiak, curator of the Trickster 2011 project, said that “Wrocław, with its history, multicultural and complicated identity, the Centennial Hall itself and the exhibition area around it – seem to be the perfect place for Mirosław Bałka, who deals in his work with the subject of memory, passing, loss and salvation, both in personal and individual as well as collective and cultural dimensions.” Bałka’s works, as realised in the public space, correspond with places the artist puts them in and simultaneously become universal symbols of permanent meaning. The simple, austere form of Bałka’s works and the materials he uses such as concrete, wood and metal, involve the audience emotionally. It is enough to remember the AuschwitzWieliczka sculpture created in 2009 especially for the Krakow ArtBoom Visual Arts Festival, or the How it is work exhibited in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London in 2010. Agata Siwiak writes in her programme text that the Trickster 2011 project is designed to induce the audience to define uncomfortable aspects of our Europeanism, to go beyond the Eurocentric way of seeing the world. The project is to provoke discussions on values and show the traps of European identity, its cultural heritage and social and political condition. The project will ask the question: Who the archetypal trickster may be today? The artist-exposer, artist-political activist, virus, upsetting the European physical and social space.

Apart from Mirosław Bałka the following artists have been invited to participate in the project: Monika Strzępka, Paweł Demirski, Dorota Masłowska, Krystian Lupa and Société Faliste – a Parisian artistic collective established by a Hungarian, Ferenc Gróf and a Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Naudy.