WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE

Bałka Mirosław


Born in Warsaw in 1958, Mirosław Bałka lives and works in Warsaw and Otwock. In his works employing sculpture, installations, and video techniques, in a manner which is very intimate and permeated with deep reflection, he refers to personal experience, also including the experience of Catholicism, and to the difficult and tangled history of Poland. He presents the issue of the complex and complicated relations between personal memory and historical remembrance.

He belongs to the most prominent artists of his generation. His works have won recognition of critics, curators, and collectors in Poland and worldwide. This was confirmed, among others, in the form of the London Tate Modern’s (the world’s largest and most prestigious public gallery) invitation to provide an installation for the Turbine Hall in the framework of "The Unilever Series" - one of the most spectacular projects dedicated to contemporary art. The artists’ works on display in the Turbine Hall, realised as a special commission for the project, have been so far viewed by an audience of more than 20 million.

In his works, Bałka uses very modest materials: ashes, soap, salt, corroded metal plates, worn-out timber, old ropes and strings, newspaper fragments, grey concrete, pine needles, hair. All this in order to reflect and to be able to feel, the specific spiritual space, not only of the past, but maybe also of the present, through the connection between the raw materials and life that has passed or the memories which only linger. The salt may refer to intimate human emotions manifested through crying or sweat. The soap evokes private, though falling within the everyday, rituals of washing and purification. The ashes command a reflection on the already forgotten custom of sweeping burnt remnants from the hearth, sprinkling them over wintery, icy paths and roads near the house. The pine needles – a pine tree by the window of the house where the artist grew up.

All those relations with the universal, everyday intimacy and privacy are saturated, in a manner which moves, but which is full of compassion and deep reflection, very mindful and tender but which at the same time disturbs the sense of calm, with references to historical remembrance: the remembrance of menacing and dreadful events of history. References to the Holocaust, which for the artist is an unhealing wound in the collective, not only Polish memory. The Holocaust is an occurrence which still invokes terror. Present at all times. The memory of which is very difficult to deal with.
AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA


The AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA work prepared for the Visual Arts Festival in Krakow it was the first permanent installation realised by the artist in a public space in Poland.

This work is an effect of the personal reflection and experiences as well as of the mindful observation of the phenomena occurring in contemporary culture. One of them found its reflection in the advertisement of a Krakow tourist agency: "In eight hours, you will have the opportunity to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps to move on to the beautiful salt mines of Wieliczka sightseeing of which provides excellent entertainment". For those planning a trip to Krakow, Auschwitz and Wieliczka seem to be melting into one, branding "eight-hour-monument" to contemporary culture, a peculiar journey to its "catacombs".


Project curator: Marek Goździewski

Pictures: Weronika Szmuc

12 - 22/06/2009

AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA

Niepodległości Square