Shadows of the Sun

While most cultural institutions in the post-pandemic period have sought to re-establish their usual operational dynamics, the Kula Gallery – a decades-long family project now under the inspired leadership of Duje Mrduljaš – has systematically expanded its activities by organising exhibitions featuring international art stars. Thanks to its historical aura and impressive architecture, the Kula Gallery program has over the years increasingly focused on the production of site and context specific projects. Besides the invited artists’ fascination with the exhibition space, such projects are pragmatically planned and realised also due to the significant reduction of transportation and insurance costs that bridge the limitations of the available budget. When such a rational strategy is complemented by an inspired artist inclined towards this type of engagement, everything becomes possible, and their presentation takes on the aura of a unique and inimitable event. The exhibition of Polish sculptor and media artist Mirosław Bałka fully attests to this. Bałka is one of the artistic luminaries that the Kula Gallery has literally regaled the Croatian cultural public with over the last decade.
Bałka is one of those thoughtful and adaptable artists who know how to navigate all the potentials when conceptualising a project, while also adeptly circumventing all the obstacles that arise during execution, ultimately maximising and reflecting the complex spatial and thematic characteristics of the exhibition space. In the demanding context of the Kula Gallery, where millennia of history intersect with the present, his interactive installation Fadensonnen (Fathomsuns), with its carefully balanced narrow range of references and assumptions, effortlessly bridged, but did not forget, the two-millennia-long history compressed within the exhibition space to address the visitor with a contemporary set of problems. It derives its name from a collection of poems by Bałka’s favourite poet, Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew who lived in Paris and wrote the verses of his hermetic and existentially poignant opus in German, the language of his family’s executioners. It is therefore already apparent from the announcement that Bałka’s installation, titled with a reference to light, diverges from the usual parables of burgeoning life and alludes to what exists and what disappears under the rays of light.
The Kula Gallery is a compact and spectacular square space with a disproportionately high vault, constructed from monumental stone blocks used for the perimeter walls of Diocletian’s Palace-fortress, where it served as a watchtower. Bałka does not touch the Roman walls but rather opens them to the view and experience that each visitor will inevitably repeat upon entering. The reflection of the massive walls in the monumental mirror facing the gallery space imposes itself as a visually dominant backdrop and establishes a direct connection with the history of the space, thus suggesting the timeless nature of the central event. The gallery is used as the setting for a performance carried out by the audience itself, developing a myriad of personal variations. As with any performance, Fadensonnen’s key elements include dramaturgy, spatial arrangement, and props. Visitors descend into the discreetly illuminated exhibition space through an existing narrow staircase, where they confront themselves and are reflected in the mirror amidst the reflection of the gallery space. The prop used by the artist is a reflective gold-silver thermal blanket designed to preserve the body heat of the forlorn, which is most commonly used today in rescuing migrants during their perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to their desired destination in Europe. Now covered in foil himself, like tens of thousands of (un)fortunate individuals, the visitors dematerialise before their own eyes, gleaming in the mirror under the sun’s rays, merging with the stone walls of the former watchtower. It is presumed that visitors, in keeping with typical contemporary behaviour, will capture themselves with their mobile phones and share images via social media with their own virtual social community, thereby digitally realising the concept of social sculpture.
Bałka is a master at achieving maximum associative complexity using minimal resources. In Fadensonnen, following the exhibition’s title, the ray of sun – light – initiates the illusion of dematerialisation, an inevitable disappearance suggested by Celan’s poetry, which Bałka, by adopting the title, introduces into the associative mechanism. The Mediterranean Sea, once the geographical nexus that connected one of the greatest civilizations in history, and within whose architecture the performance unfolds, is now a stark divider between south and north, affluence and poverty, the Christian and Muslim worlds, a tomb for thousands of migrants fleeing unbearable realities in search of an uncertain future. Thermal foil often represents their first lifeline. Balancing its techno-silver or golden surface, Bałka considers it ironic. Throughout history, these colours have signified affluence and power, yet their shimmer now signifies a fate that renders life in a war zone the only existence that is more perilous and pitiable. While immersed in their shimmering reflection, heightened by the flash of their mobile device’s camera, what thoughts will occupy the visitor? Do we perceive ourselves and our time as they truly are, contemplate it, or are we merely drifting through the sensations around us? In previous collaborations with Mirosław Bałka, I have always sensed that he trusts the audience’s ability to penetrate to the core of his hermetic message, confident that the public still desires to do so. And here we stand, amidst the refreshing aura of the ancient space, sheltered by the monumental walls of a historic watchtower now gentrified into a gallery, wrapped in a pearl-like high-tech foil with exceptional thermal properties and dispersed into an unrecognisable dazzling figure that gazes back at us in the mirror. What are we truly achieving in our daily lives, which can be hellish for some and comparatively better for others than it is for us? And what sort of future awaits us, aside from our eventual disappearance?
Mirosław Bałka comes from a family of tombstone engravers, a tradition he expanded upon through academic training as a sculptor. Throughout his career, he has organically embraced and personally contributed to the tendency of contemporary sculptors, as well as all traditional disciplines, to expand the scope of sculpture into the surrounding space through environmental, media, performative, and interactive enhancements, ultimately leading to the dematerialisation of the once sacrosanct art object. While the physical aspect of artistic work remains inevitably present, it seems to have become merely a kind of support for the fundamental artistic need to shape the human soul, channelling the human spirit towards the ineffable truths of human society and destiny.
I’ve always had the impression that from the background of Bałka’s melancholic and poetic compositions emerges the painful experience of his country’s contemporary history, tragically caught between German and Russian aspirations and exploited for some of the worst mass atrocities of modern times. He affirms that despite our efforts to distance ourselves, avoid contemplation and create barriers, fundamentally, we are implicated in all the crimes of humanity, and not just, as we often prefer to believe, the achievements of art, culture, and science. Some of us are just spatially closer to them, but all of us, observers, victims, and perpetrators, are touched by the same rays of the sun. (text Branko Franceschi)

Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland. He lives and works in Otwock, Poland, and Oliva, Spain. Balka is a sculptor also active in the field of experimental video and drawing. In 1985 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he has run the Interfaculty Studio of Activities. Professor nominated by President of Poland in 2012. Awarded the Mies van der Rohe Stipend by Krefeld Kunstmuseen. He is a member of Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
Miroslaw Balka has participated in major exhibitions worldwide including: Venice Biennale (1990, 2003, 2005, 2013; representing Poland in 1993), documenta IX, Kassel (1992), Sydney Biennale (1992, 2006), The Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1995), Sao Paulo Biennale (1998), Liverpool Biennial (1999), Santa Fe Biennale (2006). In 2009 he presented the special project How It Is for the Unilever Series, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. He is the author of the Memorial to the Victims of the Estonia Ferry Disaster in Stockholm (1997), and numerous spatial works including AUSCHWITZWIELICZKA, Cracow (2010), and HEAL, University of California, San Francisco (2009). A series of conversations between Miroslaw Balka and professor Zygmunt Bauman were published in 2012. In 2015 the artist created the stage design for Paweł Mykietyn’s Magic Mountain opera. He has participated in panel discussions with many distinguished speakers including Julian Heynen, Anda Rottenberg, Kasia Redzisz, Anja Rubik, Joseph Rykwert and Vicente Todoli.
Between 1986 and 1989 together with Miroslaw Filonik and Marek Kijewski he established the artistic group Consciousness Neue Bieremiennost.
In 2015 the exhibition Nerve. Construction at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz initiated a series of three large individual exhibitions. They were an attempt at a retrospective of the past thirty years of Balka’s creative work. Subsequent exhibitions have taken place in 2017: CROSSOVER/S in Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan and DIE SPUREN in Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen.
Earlier selected solo shows include: Freud Museum, London (2014); Centre for Contemporary Art, Vinzavod, Moscow (2013); Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (both 2011); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (both 2010); Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro (both 2007); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen K21, Düsseldorf (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Strasbourg (2004); Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw and SMAK, Gent (both 2001); National Museum of Art, Osaka (2000); Museu Serralves, Porto (1998); Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo (1997); Tate Gallery, London (1995); The Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles (1994); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Renaissance Society – University of Chicago (both 1992).
Balka’s works are in numerous institutional collections including: Tate Modern, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; MOCA, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; MOMA, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museu Serralves, Porto; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kiasma, Helsinki; Kröller-Müller, Otterlo; EMST The National Museum of Art, Athens; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Collection Lambert, Avignon; Middelheimmuseum, Antwerp; Fundación Botín, Santander; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. In Poland his works are in the collections of: Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz; Centre of Contemporary Art, Warsaw; Zacheta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; The National Museum, Wroclaw; MOCAK, Cracow; Labirynt, Lublin; Arsenał, Bialystok; IVAM, Valencia; National Museum in Warsaw.