In this video Miroslaw Balka discusses his life in Poland, where he still lives and works, using his family home as a studio. Describing the house "like a frozen situation", he talks about his family history and how his sculptures grew from the materials he was surrounded by as a child.
Balka's relationship to materials is an emotional one. Conscious of the material's history and it's "own life"; he speaks of objects that exist as sculptures and objects that have a been used in a practical way with the same sensitive consideration, attentive to the material's origin and history. Guiding us round the house, Balka picks out traces of the past that have been physically imprinted on the house and it's objects; his grandmother's broom, the worn spot in the linoleum where she knelt to pray.
Balka takes us through a jewish ghetto of WWII and then to the train station from where jews were taken to the death camp of Treblinka. He talks movingly about the memorial sculptures at the camp and the material relationship with memory that is so important in his work.
This short film gives a thoughtful insight into How it is, enabing us to consider the work in the context of his own experiences and the depth of history in which he has grown up.
"Things in art don't happen so directly, they are much more mysterious. The change of ideas takes place on the levels that we don't see with the naked eye... in the underground." -Miroslaw Balka.
The Unilever Series: Miroslawe Balka How it is is at Tate Modern in Turbine Hall until 5th April 2010.
The Unilever Series: Miroslawe Balka How it is is at Tate Modern in Turbine Hall until 5th April 2010.
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