Miroslaw Balka: Topography at Modern Art Oxford on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Dec 12 2009
until Mar 07 2010
Over the past ten years the acclaimed sculptor Miroslaw Balka has been making concise and moving video works. Topography introduces this compelling and little known work as a multi-dimensional installation in Modern Art Oxford’s galleries and offers fresh insight into the artist's practice. ‘My work is always at the frontier of things. One finds in it the traces of a political and religious situation that I try to describe, the covering up of the truth, the hiding of what you believe in, the pretence.’ Miroslaw Balka in conversation with Juan Vicente Aliaga. Balka uses his video recordings as a repository of visual and thematic material, extending a sculptural language that is rich in associations with history and his native Poland. The body and its limitations, memory, and the space between looking and knowing are recurring themes. In his videos, he assumes the role of traveller and of witness. If the historical trauma of The Holocaust figures largely in this body of work, its presence is only barely suggested. The large-scale projection of a snowy landscape in Pond (2003), mesmerising in its natural beauty and its stillness, was shot at the site of the concentration camp Auschwitz Birkenau. Its pendant Bambi (2003) in which young deer look for food in the snow amidst the barbed and metallic vestiges of the camp’s prison compound, is poignant in its reflection of the discordant layers of history and how we remember them. In more recent works, such as Flagellare A, B and C (all 2009), Balka offers a more physical expression of the human condition, capturing his repeated, violent gestures of beating the floor in a form of primitive enactment. Showing concurrently with the Miroslaw Balka: Topography exhibition will be Pawel Althamer: Common Task 12 December 2009 to 7 March 2010. OPENING HOURS: Tue – Sat: 10.00 – 17.00, Thur: 10.00 – 20.00, Sun: 12.00 – 17.00 Image Credits: Miroslaw Balka, "Bambi (Winterreise)", 2003, © the artist and Gladstone Gallery, NY Miroslaw Balka, Topography installation view, 2009, Modern Art Oxford, Photography by Edmund Blok Miroslaw Balka, Carrousel, 2004, © the artist, video still  |
