The exhibition shows a selection of recent video works by the internationally acclaimed Polish sculptor. Guest curated by Gregory Salzman, this is the artist's first solo American museum exhibition to focus on his new video installations.
Opening: Thursday, February 5, 2009
- 5:00 PM - Exhibition Preview
- 5:30-6:30 PM - In Conversation: Mirosław Bałka and Barbara London, Curator of media, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; moderated by Barton Byg, Professor, German & Scandinavian Studies, founding director of DEFA Film Library, UMass
- 6:30-7:30 PM - Reception
In Conversation: Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 5:00 PM
- Catherine Portuges, Professor, Comparative Literature, Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies
- Jenny Perlin, Five College Visiting Artist in Film Studies
- James E. Young, Chair of the Judaic & New Eastern Studies Dept., Professor, English and Judaic Studies
in a discussion on the work of Mirosław Bałka at the forefront of interdisciplinary contemporary art and thought.
Mirosław Bałka uses simple means to film everyday scenes and moments, most of them observations of details which go on to assume a mysterious and poetic dimension in his films. Tiny events produce images of great intensity, which touch upon fundamental human experiences, fears and hopes. Many of the projections have small sculptural additions that give them a concrete place in the exhibition space and involve the ephemeral medium of video in a physical reality.
Born in 1958 in Warsaw, notions of history and the residue of memory weigh heavily in Bałka's approach to art. Growing up in Catholic Poland under a Socialist regime where Western popular icons were rejected, the artist recalls that his childhood heroes were saints and martyrs. He was the grandson of a funerary-monument sculptor, and the son of a master masonry craftsman. These religious and familial traditions lend his work a pervading sense of sacredness, a somber view of history and the individual's relationship to it.
His poetic works, recalling the tragedies of European history such as the Holocaust, memorialize events through symbolic abstraction rather than discrete monument. His video works of memory and forgetfulness, presence and absence, meditate on what history leaves behind and ties it to the body and the memory of those living in the present.Mirosław Bałka's work has been the subject of many one-person exhibitions internationally, including the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo; IVAM, Centre Del Carme, Valencia; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Centre d'art contemporain, Thiers; Tate Gallery, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; and Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Mirosław Bałka represented Poland at the 1993 Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Warsaw.
A brochure will be published with an essay by Barbara London, curator of media, Museum of Modern Art, and an interview between Balka and curator Gregory Salzman.
The exhibition will be opened until March 29, 2009.
University Gallery
Fine Arts Center, University of Massachussets
Amherst, MA 01003