Collection Study
Mirosław Bałka, 250 x 700 x 455, Ø 41 x 41/ZOO/T, 2007/2008

Text by Marlies Augustijn
March 2019

First Encounter

Zoo/T (2007/2008) is a large octagonal construction measuring about 7m in length, 4.5m in width and 2.5m in height. Its shape resembles the bare framework of a house with a small loft.

The structure is solely made from silver-grey steel bars. The steel is slightly rusted.

A light bulb emanates a feeble light from one of the upper-bars.

A bucket is placed on the ground and contains a liquid. A pump inside the bucket keeps agitating the fluid. Upon closer inspection, the liquid turns out to be red wine.

The installation assumes a powerful presence in the space. Its open framework allows for anyone to enter into the structure and the shining light suggests an invitation to do so. Yet the structure has such a rigid and deserted quality that it becomes unapproachable at the same time.

Contextualization

Mirosław Bałka was born and raised in Otwock, a town on the outskirts of Warsaw in Poland. He received a Catholic upbringing that was marked by austerity and confinement. He shared a small house with his parents, maternal grandparents and older sister. Multiple personas, their sounds and smells were always in immediate proximity to each other. This large and diverse household made personal space limited and reduced the possibility for privacy.

To date, Bałka still inhabits his childhood home and uses it as his studio. Bałka's strong and enduring connection with his house and its physical surroundings informs the deeply rooted domestic experience within his practice. This link manifests itself directly in the components of Bałka’s works: plywood, scaffolding, iron, concrete, steel. Rough, unfinished materials that he often finds in and around his house, and that tend to surround many of us in our day-to-day lives.

Bałka’s limited use of materials is one aspect of his practice that reveals a clear sense of restraint. This resonates with his childhood in which the possibility of moving around unnoticed was minimal. There are more aspects of Bałka’s works that echo ideas of restriction and confinement. He has made coffin-like structures and often implements walls and tunnels. These types of constructions organise movement against free will. Bałka lays bare the fragility of the human body by showing its weaknesses and inevitable end, such as sickness, pain and death. He opens up human fears by guiding visitors in a controlled direction. The audiences are made conscious of their movements and the fact that they may be manipulated. This consequently arouses anxiety and a diminished sense of control over the situation.

Bałka combines his personal memories and experiences with collective cultural memory. Poland is drenched in a traumatic past marked by World War II, the Holocaust and their aftermath. The 1980s proved to be a dark period as well. Communism and poverty were omnipresent, and constructive change towards a more equal society seemed out of reach. In a radio broadcast with Mirosław Bałka, artist Phyllida Barlow describes Poland as a “one-colour country” where the extraordinary grief running through the region feels inherent.¹ Bałka reinforces this melancholic image when he is asked whether it is possible to be both happy and Polish. After a long silence, he replies: “I was happy and Polish for many years, but now I am not so sure about this happiness.”²

¹ Morris, Frances. Behind the Scenes: Mirosław Bałka. BBC Radio 4, 18 July 2018
² Ibid.

Zoo/T accumulates many key elements in Mirosław Bałka’s artistic practice, such as the use of open structures and everyday materials, the presence of light and the reference to Poland’s history. More specifically, Zoo/T directly derives from Bałka’s investigation into Poland’s WWII death camps. The installation is a minimal reconstruction of a zoo or menagerie that existed at Treblinka, a concentration camp built by the Nazis in 1942. The zoo was built by order of the official who ran the camp, to entertain the guards who lived on site. Bałka discovered photos of the zoo and was able to construct a replica of the building. The story of the zoo, a site for entertainment in an otherwise horrible, bleak environment, brings out the contradictions often present in Bałka’s works. They are partly inviting and warm, partly abhorrent and incredibly saddening.

The Human Element

Bałka’s practice references places that are charged with violent and traumatic pasts. The event can be as specific as the Holocaust. In other instances, a work deals with human conditions more conceptually, such as imprisonment, death or alienation. In Kategorie (2005) five coloured threads are hung from the ceiling of a concrete tunnel. The colours were used in concentration camps to mark different categories of prisoners. In 196 x 230 x 141 (2007) visitors are lured into a short corridor informed by a light bulb. When they enter the tunnel, the light turns off and the corridor becomes dark. The experience implies that aiming for the light results in failure, suggesting that positivity or change is out of reach.

“Being united in happiness is less important than being united in pain”³, Bałka has said in an interview. Visitors can get a grasp of the implications of this vision through the sense of oppression, anxiety or melancholia Bałka’s oeuvre carries. Paradoxically, the open structures, luring lights, or high temperatures applied in his works at times stir a feeling of comfort or something we could call hope. Bałka’s major commission for Tate’s Turbine Hall How It Is (2009/10) was a large-scale black container that invited people to enter. It evoked associations with modern locations of strangers living together separated by fences, slowly developing a fear for the other. Yet when entering the structure, visitors could experience a feeling of safety even in the dark and presence of many others. This could be achieved simply by looking back to the open entrance looking out on daylight. There was also a sense of being all in the same situation together, whatever would happen. Through this paradox, How It Is questioned whether our fears are realistic or often ungrounded.

³ Balka, Miroslaw in Helen Sainsbury. “A Bitter Happiness.” Miroslaw Balka: How It Is. Tate, 2009, p. 108

Most sites that Bałka explores are used, heavily touched and pierced by grief or terror. These are places that have collected a psyche of segregation, isolation and repression. In turn, the locations referenced in Bałka’s works have left their bleak scars on the cultural landscape and shaped the course of history. For Bałka, the human body and human intervention are the basis of all experience. His installations therefore always imply human presence but in their corporeal absence. Materials like salt, soap, ashes, liquids and hair recall human traces without including the human body. Salt for example reminds of tears, ashes of death, soap of hygiene. The red wine that fills the bucket present in Zoo/T provokes a suggestion of human involvement through its reference to blood.

The full title of Zoo/T is 250 x 700 x 455, Ø 41 x 41/Zoo/T. Here we find another implication of human presence, namely that of the artist himself. Bałka involves his own body in many of his works, through reference to his measurements. Zoo/T has a height of 250cm, the height of Bałka with his arms outstretched above his head. In the installation, the original zoo in Treblinka has been rescaled to be in proportion with Bałka’s dimensions, which presents the viewer with the confronting realisation that cruel events against the nature of human kind have taken place at the hands of human beings themselves.

The Non-Figurative

Bałka used to draw frequently as a child. He employed drawing as a mechanism to escape from confined spaces to his imagination. His sculptural practice started with figurative representations of his immediate surroundings. A frequently cited example is his work Remembrance of the First Holy Communion (1985), in which we see a boy dressed for the ritual that will guide him into adulthood. Bałka’s artistic education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw taught him that sculpture could only be figurative. Slowly Bałka realised that it was not necessary to reproduce a human body to imply its presence or influence. From 1989 onwards, Bałka’s sculptures have been non-figurative, starting with the work Oasis (C.D.F.) (1989), which recalls a domestic room including a bed that resembles a coffin. Besides sculpture, installation and drawing, Bałka sometimes employs photography and video. He has particularly used these mediums to convey an experience or atmosphere, especially ones related to death camps. In 170 x 126 x 10/T. Turn (2004) for example, he has filmed Treblinka in a 360º turn while lying on his back, composing an abstract and destabilizing image.

His practice is regularly mentioned in relation to Arte Povera, an Italian art movement that encouraged the exploration of everyday, disposable materials over commercial goods. Artists worked with soils, rocks, wood and twigs rather than oil paint or bronze, like Bałka who often restricts himself to the materials he finds around him. It would however, be limiting to define Bałka through the lens of one art historical trend. His abstracted representations of the world, the absence of human bodies, and his choice of simple geometric shapes recall a minimalist aesthetic. Moreover, his works rely on various layers of meaning without making those visually explicit, which reminds of conceptualism. Zoo/T brings all these elements essential to Bałka’s practice together but also shows that Bałka moves beyond traditional artistic groupings and has developed a very personal style.

Memory is always an interpretation or projection of an experience. Bałka’s works are his selection from and interpretation of history and lived experience. They encourage the viewer to come a bit closer to the understanding of trauma. They stimulate to develop a view on and remember horrible events of the past, and to never repeat them.

Practical

Zoo/T was commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, for Balka’s solo-exhibition Tristes Tropiques (14 November 2007 – 27 January 2008). The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book Tristes Tropiques (1955) in which Strauss recounts his encounters with Brazilian cultures and rituals. Strauss writes: “The first thing travel has now to show us is the filth, our filth, which we have thrown in the face of humanity”⁴, which is in a way reminiscent of Balka’s explorations.

⁴ Strauss, Lévi in Enrique Juncosa. “Foreword.” Mirosław Bałka: Tristes Tropiques. Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 6

The work was added to the David and Indrė Roberts Collection in 2009. In 2014, Bałka’s work 225 x 66 x 109 (2003), a steel lamp in the shape of a pointed roof, was also acquired for the collection.

The Human Element: Conversation with Mirosław Bałka at Walmer Yard

For the full interview, see youtube

This conversation is an edited transcript of the talk that took place on 23 January 2019 at Walmer Yard, London, between Fatoş Üstek (Director & Chief Curator, DRAF), Marlies Augustijn (Assistant Curator, DRAF) and Mirosław Bałka. Walmer Yard forms a set of four interlocking houses set around an open courtyard, designed and crafted by architect Peter Salter together with Fenella Collingridge and developed by Crispin Kelly. This new building provided an untouched, special site that offered interesting starting points for the conversation. Walmer Yard creates a feeling of detachment and retreat where time flow changes in relation to the movement on the streets. The space exerts a kind of tranquillity; intentionally built to be deprived of an overload of intrusive technology. It is almost a monument of hope and optimism for future living where people share the secluded intimacy of a community.

Mirosław Bałka: It was beautiful that there was a moment of silence before we started to talk. It felt a bit as being in a private mass somewhere, like in Christiania in Copenhagen, in an almost hippy environment. The architectural context makes me think about a fairytale or something unreal […]. Thank you for inviting me to such an intriguing interior.

Fatoş Üstek: […] To contextualise Walmer Yard a bit further: it was designed and crafted by architect Peter Salter. We saw immediately that you both have an interest in the human presence. In his architectural drawings, Salter inserts human sketches into the designs […]. The drawings almost become projections of a future life that will exist in the dwellings. We found this quite interesting in juxtaposition to your artistic practice. In many of your works, presence through absence is central, as your works are composed of human traces or accumulate resonances of people. Could you perhaps talk a bit more about the urgency of considering the human element without the human body?

M.B.: At the beginning of my artistic practice, I started with quite an academic education. […] When I left the Academy, I understood the human figure. In 1985 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, there was no other perspective of understanding sculpture than figurative sculpture. […] A very good example that illustrates this is my work Fire Place (1986) in the Tate Modern Collection.

I slowly began to research how to replace the figure or the human body. Eventually I started using the coffin or urn. This element is connected to our body as the body’s dimensions should fit the coffin, yet it can replace the physical body. Consequently, in my works between 1989 and 1990, I started to show shapes related to the body instead of the bodies themselves. Step by step I noticed that I did not have to reproduce a human body in the space to talk about human bodies. […] Finally, it occurred to me that the human body returns to my installations in the figure of the visitor. Visitors make minimal gestures in the space, in which my own gestures can be recognised. My works do not exist without the presence of the visitor; the visitor is taking the role of a figurative sculpture in the space. This is a very performative experience. After many years I understood that the figure is still represented in the exhibition because without the visitor the exhibition would be dead.

Marlies Augustijn: You mentioned the coffin and confined spaces being a big part of your practice. You are now sitting in front of an image of your house and studio in Poland. In many of your interviews you bring up the significance of this house and the town where you grew up. You lived very closely with your family in a relatively small space. This resulted in many of your works referencing confined spaces. This makes me wonder what your practice would look like if you would not still live in Poland; if you would have left earlier. How big is the significance of you staying there and continuing to live in the house in which you grew up?

M.B.: […] Artistic practice is life practice, so you cannot separate these two. My life is my art. My art is my life.

This house was built by my grandfather in 1935. When I got this house in 1993 when nobody lived there anymore, I think it changed my artistic practice very much. I could start to work in the spaces in which memories of me and my family were occurring. It was a very important moment.

Earlier on I had already experienced a similar moment. This was when I made my diploma work in 1985. […] It was a very important sculpture called Remembrance of the First Holy Communion (1985). I brought this sculpture into the context of an abandoned house somewhere in Poland and exhibited the work there. We brought the whole commission to the site. At that time I started to realise how important the different contexts of display are, and that a place can have such a strong relation to the work itself. […] I noticed that all my representative structures of knowledge broke down being confronted with the situation outside of the Academy. Upon reflection I felt that a work of art should maybe be constructed in a way that it can also live outside of the Academy or outside of my studio. I realised the importance of different contexts.

I moved back into my childhood house in 1993 when there were just empty rooms. The furniture was very clean because my mother always put a lot of attention to the discipline of the place. For the first year I was afraid of doing anything that would dirty it. Slowly, I moved one bed out because I needed the space. My parents lived in the house next door so I was uncertain what I could or could not do. Finally, the place ended up being very dirty. By dirty I mean that it carries a lot of traces of my work. To change the house where I grew up into the place where I am working was not an easy process. It took me time. However it also activated my memories and those of the people living there. The concept of ‘limits’ was very important for me, which is quite visible in my art through the limits of the dimensions. Working in this house I could not make something that would be bigger than the size of the window or the door, as I had to take it out. Very often I had to take works out through one specific window because this window was in the space where I welded most of the works.

F.U.: We could observe that this house brought about another thread in your work, namely the restriction of materials. This resonates with Walmer Yard as well. Peter Salter centralised four materials: concrete, steel, wood and clay. In your work there is also a refined minimalism. It is not a representational refinement but it is almost like a transformation, taking it to another place related to your immediate personal life. Yet somehow the works have a life of their own.

M.B.: What is important for me in my artistic practice is listening: listening to the place where I work. Much inspiration for my works comes from the process of listening to the house, for example my works with ashes. They derive from the everyday process of heating the house with coal. […] I was confronted with a large amount of ash and so I collected it. […] Ash was in some ways a trace of the heat. I am very interested in conveying the traces we leave in my art. Take for example the first inspiration for another work which was shown last summer at White Cube: a column constructed with pieces of soap. The inspiration for this piece came from a box with used pieces of soap collected by my grandmother. […]

Quite an important part of my practice became how I can show something which comes from ordinary life; something which is a trace, like the used pieces of soap are the trace of washing hands. They are an element of hygiene at home. How can I transform them? How can I make them beautiful in some way? I am working with materials like old rubber balls, rusted steel plates, wooden planks almost eaten by worms. But I have a feeling that I am talking about beauty – I am not afraid of this word. This is a possibility the gesture of artists offers.

[…] There are famous photos of Samuel Beckett sitting on bags full of garbage. My gesture is that I am not only sitting on this garbage; I just opened the bags. I am looking for goods which I can transform into the objects of aesthetic desire. […] Artists like Kurt Schwitters started to use ordinary objects and I think I am continuing in some way the practice of these artists. My studio now looks like the Merzbau.

M.A: This reminds me of an interview where you go around your house and talk more about certain traces that have been left. One of them is a trace from your grandmother who was touching the ground during her prayers. You can still see that mark on the floor. I think this clearly shows your engagement with traces left by people and the importance you give to them. This stems very much from your personal memory but there are also works, such as Zoo/T (2007/08), in which you represent a more collective memory and a bigger trauma. This work refers to the concentration camp Treblinka where one of the officers built a zoo to entertain the camp guards. It was a place of fun in a horrible environment where thousands of people died. I wonder how you transform these kinds of traumas into a piece?

M.B: […] My stone was thrown into the water of a place called Otwock where my house is. My artistic activity and the surplus of this activity are like ripples across the water. Once I was dropped it happened like this. The first ripple was the ripple of childhood and then it became wider for the memory of my family living there and then suddenly I noticed the ripple of the Holocaust. This took place in the territories of East and Central Europe and the city where I grew up was part of the Holocaust. 8000 Jews were sent from the city of Otwock to Treblinka. For many years the history of Poland and the Communist time, like the history of all these Communist countries, was very far away from the truth. The information was very limited. I received serious information to form a real image of the Holocaust only quite late; I was already 30-something. I knew about the Holocaust but the literature available did not cover the local history. I knew that the Holocaust was in Auschwitz. Outside. Not so close. However, I noticed that I lived only one street away from the former border of a ghetto in Otwock. The ghetto covered much more territory than the rest of the city because 75% of the citizens of the city were Jews. Then you start to think about the situation in which on one day,

8.000 people were taken away. How empty from one day to another the place was. More than half of the people disappeared.

[…] Slowly, step by step, I felt a responsibility for this history. I wanted to fill the gaps in memory with my works. I started my travels to death camps like Treblinka. […] I found that it was my task as an artist to say something about that time. I started to think how I could transform. What would be the words I could use to talk about such an important subject like the Holocaust. […] Paul Celan used to break the language of his poetry to construct new words and new contexts for the words and so talk about the Holocaust. I also tried to do that.

F.U.: […] For me one of the strongest experiences of your work was at the Turbine Hall in 2009. To climb the ramp and to walk into that pitch-dark container with other people was quite a strong and unsettling feeling. Of course it opens up a projection of the showers that many of the Jews were sent to at the concentration camps and of other places of violence. […] I still feel like there is somehow, somewhere, hope embedded in your works. However, when you talk about them it is mostly the dark side that comes forward. What would you say?

M.B.: There is always hope in my work. It is related to different gestures. One is being at this big steel box titled How It Is (2009/10) at Tate. If you turned your body 180 degrees you saw the light at the end, at the entrance. Hope was created by looking back. In the work Zoo/T mentioned before, there was an element of warming the situation: a naked electric bulb that was fixed at the top of the sculpture. The light of hope. […] With hope it is like with everything in life. Hope is different for everybody; there is not one general hope. There are different hopes and they are all very private hopes. And they do not need to have huge dimensions. A little light can change your perception of seeing, and of being.

M.A: I still feel that the element of light in some of your works is only a suggestion of light and warmth but once you get closer, that disappears. There is one work where that is particularly apparent. There is a light and when one enters the work it goes off. To me it feels like hope definitely does not prevail. What do you think? What would you like people to take away from your work?

M.B.: Beckett said: “to fail, to fail again, to fail better.” There is an element of hope in failure as well. I like this game between light and darkness. The work which you mentioned is called 196 x 230 x 141 (2007). […] It is a small corridor closed from one side. On the other side, you see the light through the gaps between the planks which form the corridor. When you come to the opening of this corridor the light goes off. You stop seeing the light. In the hope of finally being confronted with the situation, the light switches off. It is not for you, it is dark. However, when you wait quietly, not moving the body for one minute, the light comes back. Nobody does it because we are running too fast nowadays. It is also about time. I think time is very important. It was always an important element of the perception of a work of art, of life. If we do not give time to other life, to the art of others, we are just runners. […] We just run like rabbits. If you stop people and ask why they run, they say “I am running because I am born to run.”

F.U.: […] Actually that is a very important element of your work. I think it is almost your subliminal expectation from the audiences: that space of contemplation, of pause. You mentioned Beckett a lot and he is very good at writing pauses between words, where the narrative infiltrates into concrete, solid form. What is it that you need from those spaces? In many of your works, there is an immediate experience but the experience increasingly unfolds and boils as you continue to stay.

M.B.: There is no meditation if you do not stop. […] I try to build this meditative situation because I think that my responsibility as an artist when I exhibit in institutions, galleries and museums is to make something different than everyday life. That is why I am not very much related to pop culture. I am related to the shadow of pop culture; a waste produced by pop culture. I think what I can offer to the people is just to slow down. […] I very often give the example that being in contact with a work of art, my work of art, is like reading poetry. Not every day can you read poetry; not every day can you read Thomas Stearns Eliot.

[…]

M.A.: What I also find interesting is that the title of your exhibition opening tomorrow 24 January 2019 at White Cube Mason’s Yard is Random Access Memory. It does not refer to something material; it refers to the data that computers collect and that form an elaborate digital memory that is difficult to comprehend. I wonder what layer technology adds for you in the collection of personal and collective memory?

M.B.: We collect too much memory from our computers. I would like to add that the title is always part of the work for me. When I construct the title, it always becomes as important as the exhibition itself. […] Look slowly into these three words: random, access, memory. Then you start to think about the possible access or random access to memory. What is a memory? What is your presence, what is your relation, how much memory can we use? […] The titles are extremely important. If you look at the list of my solo shows I think there is a kind of poetry in how one title follows another. […] The space between neighbor-titles is a very important pause, as what Fatos said about Beckett. I am looking for relations between the titles; they are always building something. Sometimes it is something which you do not understand immediately. If you look closer you might not find the logic but you will find poetry.