Sza (Shh)

Mirosław Bałka grew up in a small house in Otwock on the outskirts of Warsaw. The house, which became his studio, is occasionally the subject of his installations and sculptures; the artist's works often relate directly to the dimensions of his body as well as to those of the studio. Balka's works are strongly affected by personal history- his grandfather was a gravestone cutter and his father used to engrave the names on the tombstones-and by collective memories of death-8,000 Jews from Otwock were dispatched in cattle cars to the death camp of Treblinka in 1942-bestowing on his art an underlying aura of lamentation. Remembrance of the First Holy Communion (1985), Bałka's first major sculp- ture, was produced as part of the graduation requirements for the Warsaw Academy. In this representation of a young boy standing by a table on a raised platform, Bałka rehearsed the themes of nostalgia and remembrance that he was to explore in his subsequent work. Beginning in 1990, Bałka shifted from a realist representation of the human body to a more minimalist concept in which he retains human refer ences, frequently using architectural methods and video to stage his sparse works. Like Minimal art, Bałka's sculptures and installations are strongly influenced by Existentialism and Structuralism. Minimalist sculpture differs from classical and even modernist sculpture by emphasizing the process of viewing and the experience of the work rather than its formal integrity and overall composition. The spectator is forced to create meaning from his or her own personal experience of the sculpture-a process that becomes part of the work itself. It is precisely at the intersection of the historical responsibility of forms, which Roland Barthes spoke of, and 1 the inspired substitution of the Self for the Other through responsibility, as described by Emmanuel Levinas, where Existentialism and Structuralism meet. Minimal art not only invites participation but summons the viewer to share this responsibility. Bałka once stated that his way of working could very well be interpreted as a method of coming to terms with a profound fear of death. Bałka reminds us that there is no strict border between life and death. Video footage filmed by the artist at the Majdanek concentration camp features prominently in his installations. These video installations often include salt or soap, suggesting rites of passage and renewal. Other installations, comprised of chains made out of obituaries from local newspapers created by the artist and a group of volunteers in a makeshift workshop, constitute an act of mourning and prayer. According to the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who has also been intensely involved in the question of the self and its differential relationship to the Other (which he expressed in the term différance) and who dedicated much of his late writings to the notion of mourning, one cannot come to terms with one's life without trying to apprehend one's death or, as Judith Butler remarked, "ask ing, in effect, how a human learns to live and to die." Mourning is unspeakable, as Derrida reminds us: There is... no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work. This is also why one should not be able to say anything about the work of mourning... since it cannot become a theme, only another experience of mourning that comes to work over the one who intends to speak... of mourning or any thing else. And that is why whoever thus works at the work of mourning learns the impossible-and that mourning is inter- minable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable. Right up until death-that is what whoever works at mourning knows, working at mourning as both their object and their resource, working at mourning as one 4 would speak of a painter working at a painting." Bałka's works are simultaneously works of mourning and works about mourning. Their "corporealization" form a language of the body-a sacramen- tal body without the promise of penance and absolution. But they are also about the impossibility of mourning. The sins they lament cannot be mourned because, as Derrida writes, "the mere recognition of a debt already tends toward its cancellation in a denial... Consciousness in general is perhaps the sacrificial and bereaved denial of the sacrifice it mourns. This may be why there must not be-why there shall be-no mourning."
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.