Miroslaw Balka

AbstractDominick LaCapra has brought into focus the relationship between the notions of trauma, absence, and loss, highlighting the need to differentiate these respective cultural phenomena. For the last two decades, Polish critical art has galvanized public opinion and shocked traditionally minded art critics. With time, artists have moved from waging a frontal attack on cultural taboos to a reassessment of the wartime past and its aftermath. Zbigniew Libera’s Lego Concentration Camp might serve as a proof of this transition. Recently, the focus has shifted again to the manifestations of Jewish presence in Poland, either in the past or in the future. As much as Mirosław Bałka’s monumental How It Is (2009) represents absence, Yael Bartana’s series of films, Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland: Mary Koszmary (“Nightmares”), The Wall and Tower, and Assassination, attempts to imaginatively reinstate Jewish life in Poland. Wojciech Wilczyk’s photographic project, There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye (2008), cataloging the re-maining synagogues and houses of prayer in Poland, traces the posthumous life of Jewish architecture not only in the wake of the Holocaust but also after four decades of Communism and twenty years of capitalist ingenuity. Łukasz Baksik’s Matzevot 163for Everyday Use (2010) is another photographic project of interest. Last but not least, Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You, Jew! (2005–ongoing) proposes a reparative psychoanalysis of the body politic via a series of interventions in the public space.This paper is going to examine the aesthetic underpinnings of these represen-tations of absence/loss and a recent shift of emphasis to political interventions in Polish Holocaust art. The aforementioned artworks expand the problematization proposed by LaCapra by engaging the audiences in the process of reinstating Jewish presence. The invitation extended to the Jews is possible in the realm of art, as it can play with the sociopolitical, triggering a reconsideration of the traumatic past.

The article aims to discuss the socio-political action of two contemporary musical performances produced in Poland. In particular, the author questions the specific function of the space, created by the visual artist Mirosław Bałka, in relation to the compositions by musician Paweł Mykietyn. In both cases they are adaptations of literary works (Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, 1834, and Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann, 1924) and in both cases it is the process of media transposition that rewrites the terms of cultural and identity discourse. Balka's design proposes, in a non-didactic way, traumatic images that are already well established and codified in the European collective memory and creates, in the fleeting time of the performance, a democratic and open structure, in which the memory of the defeated also participates.

When one encounters the works of Polish artist, Miroslaw Balka, one almost certainly feels perplexed by his highly minimalist-looking and individuated forms. Apparently, his body of work is a metaphorical language that correlates his art and sensibility with works by the hugely influential precedent set by the late German artist Joseph Beuys in terms of using simple and specific materials with transcendental and metaphysical properties. In this regard, he fuses his work with personal memories of growing up in post-war Warsaw. He allusively suggests a vision of hell and humanity on Polish land in the past. Hence, Balka's work is probably not art that holds one’s attention through visual impact but rather art that murmurs his story...

On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Miroslaw Balka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for ‘archival’ media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist.