Miroslaw Balka
Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland where he lives and works. Comprising installation, sculpture and video, Balka’s work has a bare and elegiac quality that is underlined by the care-ful, minimalist placement of objects, as well as the gaps and pauses between them. Balka’s work deals with both personal and collective memories, especially as they relate to his Catholic upbringing and the collective experience of Poland’s fractured history. Through this investigation of domestic memories and public catastrophe, he ex-plores how subjective traumas are translated into collective histo-ries and vice versa. His materials are simple, everyday objects and things, but also powerfully resonant of ritual, hidden memories and the history of Nazi occupation in Poland.