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.
