Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka’s work combines architecture and sound, resulting in creative reversals and translations. The artist’s acoustic research on tangible matter merges with her preoccupation with the emotional, social, and cultural dimensions of the functioning of sound, including the spoken word.
Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka creates sculptures, sound installations, and compositions through which she 'gives voice to architecture', allowing buildings to speak through acoustics. To examine them, she uses sound, which she perceives in terms of a physical experience – architecture’s touch. For her, sound constitutes a building material allowing one to construct and tune into architecture. To this purpose, she endows buildings with a sonic quality, wishing to transform them into sculptures.
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Katarzyna Krakowiak from Poland has been selected to represent Poland at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition. The President of the Biennale di Venezia, Paolo Baratta and the Director of this year's edition David Chipperfield announced their Common Ground theme earlier this year, aiming for a more responsible approach to architecture around the world
Krakowiak-Bałka has mostly been active in institutional and public spaces, whose existing order she reverses, creating a 'negative' which reveals their invisible framework, concealed infrastructure, pauses, intervals, and accidental sound events in the life of architectural spaces. Her exhibitions often comprise seemingly empty exhibition halls, and many of her compositions constitute attempts at capturing the sound of silence. These reversals allow her to observe phenomenons on the verge of visibility yet crucial for the functioning of reality.
It was in this spirit that, together with the curator Michał Libera, she executed her work Making the Walls Quake as if They Were Dilating with the Secret Knowledge of Great Powers in the Polish Pavillion at the International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia in 2012. The idea was to fill the pavilion with the sounds reaching it from the outside, especially from the neighbouring expositions. The construction was subjected to acoustic analysis, and the ventilation system through which the sound entered was unclogged. Additionally, the artist created an installation that amplified the psychoacoustic sensations inside the pavilion. The latter was thereby transformed into a system of sound distribution and reception, depicting architecture as 'an original system of listening', which produces, transmits and distorts sounds.
The piece constitutes a reversal of conventional perception of architectural spaces, proving that they also serve the role of connectors. Krakowiak-Bałka and Libera describe the subject thus:
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Every architecture is an acoustic phenomenon – it forms an environment for sound propagation, reinforces some of its properties at the expense of others, and also absorbs it, filters and transmits. In a discreet and invisible manner, it, thereby, organises social life. A sonic perspective allows to discuss the process in terms other than separation and delimitation of social spaces. Walls, floors, ventilation, heating or sewage systems – are all systems of connecting and transforming interpersonal relations, rather than their disjunction.
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Together with curator Michał Libera, Krakowiak transforms the pavilion space into a vibrating structure of sound that picks up on the noise generated by neighbouring pavilions (Egypt, Serbia, Venice, Romania) via microphones installed in the floors and ventilation, heating and sewage systems.
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The Rise and Fall of Air, Zachęta National Gallery of Art 2013, photo: Krzysztof Pijarski
The strategy of ‚listening to architecture via spaces inaccessible to the eye’ was further implemented in the second edition of the Venice achievement: The Rise and Fall of Air, presented in 2013 in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art. The entire building was involved in the execution of the project. The artist’s focus was, however, not on the exhibition halls but rather on the vast system of unused spaces within the building – inaccessible spaces, cracks, and chambers in the walls, as well as elevator shafts. It’s within them that she created a sound sculpture, demonstrating how they absorb the sound reverberating in the building. Here, Krakowiak-Bałka treats sound as an ‚object’ that ‚rises, falls, moves horizontally, fades’ and analyses its relationship with gravity.
In the same year, as a part of the PERFORMA festival, the artist explored the vast vacant spaces inside the James A. Farley Post Office in New York, a historical edifice which, due to the modernisation of post and workforce reduction, now stands almost completely empty. Krakowiak-Bałka made the unused spaces available to the public and emitted a sound composition comprising, for instance, recorded sounds of a working post office (cancelling, sorting, etc.). The piece made walls shake as the vacant interiors vibrated with the sounds of what used to be their purpose.
Some of the artist’s interventions leave permanent traces on the institutions, as is the case with As Though Nothing Could Fall Except the Sun (2016), realised in the Szczecin Philharmonic. Krakowiak-Bałka created an installation inspired by the covered with golden tiles concert hall, a video screening, and a composition made of sounds recorded on maintenance breaks during concerts, which she combined with the sounds of processes taking place on the Sun. Fragments of this composition have remained in the philharmonic hall, where they now serve the function of a bell tune calling for the audience to take their eats.
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Katarzyna Krakowiak has created a project devoted to the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, as part of the MoMA’s Post online-research platform.
A peculiar trace of the artist’s presence was a scratch, made with a diamond on the window pane on the ground floor of Warsaw’s Królikarnia palace during a performative tour of the building, an element of a 2017 performance titled The Whisper of Those Things Isn’t Real. This sound project problematised the palace and its surroundings in the context of the seclusion of the exterior and interior space and the connection between them.
Krakowiak-Bałka isn’t interested merely in a scientific analysis of the relation between the materiality of buildings and acoustic waves. Her work opens itself up to the sphere of feeling by utilising metaphors. The titular 'fall’ of the air at the Zachęta exhibition was meant to mirror the human condition. The project undertaken in the building of the New York post office sprung from the question of why we feel safe in certain spaces, and its goal was to attune us to the role of sound in the formation of memories. Recapturing the sounds of the space’s previous function, the composition prompted nostalgic reflection on receding into the past. The installation in Szczecin was dedicated to the sun, failure, struggle, and beauty, personified by the figure of Icarus through whom the author surveyed the human tendency to soar towards 'blinding purposes – the eerie dynamics of perpetual return: falling and rising anew’.
In her work, Krakowiak-Bałka translates sound into other forms of transcription and examines the way it intertwines with silence. She attempted to capture the physical dimension of silence in her performance titled Shorthand (2013, P.!, New York) and had the recorded material written down as a stenographic record using the alphabet. Thanks to that, 'silence (absence) and sound (presence) acquired a different dimension in the multi-stage process of translating space into a record’.
The theme of translating sound was also present in her sound sculpture Out of Tune (Polish Institute in Berlin, 2015). Here, a stenographic record covered a composition comprising two competing melodic lines: a recording of birdsong and the artist’s voice. She could thereby demonstrate how man-made sounds drown out other organisms, thereby causing the latter to be out of tune, their message unintelligible. The artists also diagnosed such discord in architecture, which is also composed of sounds, referring to Rem Koolhaas’ concept of junkspace, which is used to describe chaotically and hastily modernized spaces. Krakowiak-Bałka’s project forms an insightful critique of architecture, specifically of architecture’s tendency to increasingly drown out the world while losing the ability to communicate with it. What constitutes the horizon of her reflections on silence is civilizational sound pollution, affecting non-human animals, whose perspective serves as a significant point of reference for the artist.
Another project devoted to the intertwining of sound and silence is titled When a stem breaks the water perpendicularly, its angle is measured to be 0 degree, and the degree gets closer to 90 as it is slanted more, and the level surface is 90 degrees [from the Sogetsu Ikebana Handbook]. It concerns the now nonexistent Sogetsu Art Center complex in Tokyo designed by Kenzo Tange – a building containing ikebana school halls connected to an underground music auditorium. The artist examined how the music played in the auditorium filters in the submerged in silence halls, presenting the outcomes as a graphic model comprising a series of technical drawings.
Another type of translation taking place in Krakowiak-Bałka’s works is the visualisation of sound’s distribution in space in the form of acoustic models. Such visualisations were also created, for instance, for the now nonexistent furniture store Emilia in 2014, when it was home to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The artist prepares detailed analyses and acoustic models for most of her projects, endowing them with a scientific character and cooperating closely with scientists. Not only that, but she is also well familiar with the technology of the utilised devices, which she often constructs herself and modifies for the needs of the given project.
Krakowiak-Bałka’s art merges the strong scientific-technological touch with the artist’s interest in social and cultural contexts, which make her analytical practice less hermetic. In her project Best to the Best, executed in the Indian town of Pune in 2015, together with a team of local architecture students, they explored the cultural tradition of local construction methods. They put into practice an old technique of foundation soil preparation, manually churning layers of mud inside a construction placed in a space reverberating with the sounds of their work. Here, the artist's investigation of sound as an element of the sensual experience of architecture took the form of community-based research. It is a significant dimension of Krakowiak-Bałka’s work. She often builds a community of people around her projects – often quite numerous groups whom she gives agency and voice.
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W projekcie zrealizowanym dla paryskiego Jeu de Paume artystka Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka po raz kolejny pozwala odbiorcom usłyszeć architekturę. Wykracza jednak przy tym nie tylko poza przeszklenie budowli, ale i w jego odległą przeszłość.
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Katarzyna Krakowiak, "Human Antenna", performance in 2011 at Instytut Sztuki Wyspa in Gdańsk. Photo: Elvin Flamingo
There is, moreover, no shortage of references to socio-political issues in Krakowiak-Bałka’s art. In her early series of performances All.FM (2008-2011), she strolled down the streets of various cities (Jaffa, Warsaw, Wrocław) with a radio transmitter, appropriating the ether, piracy-style, with her own messages regarding local social conflicts (e.g. the displacement of the Arab population from one of the Tel Aviv districts). It was also then that she reconstructed the broadcasting center on the premises of the Gdańsk Shipyard, through which she broadcast a show as a part of a project titled Human Antenna. Gdańsk Shipyard Radio 94FM (2011). She thus referred to the turbulent history of the Shipyard by making a technological-auditory intervention that restored an element of the place’s past.
What became another one of her collective, socially engaged works was the extensive project titled It Begins with One Word. Choose Your Own, undertaken in the Pavilion Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona (2020). Krakowiak-Bałka executed the piece during the period of social isolation related to the coronavirus pandemic. She utilized the sound system installed in the pavilion to broadcast recordings submitted by dozens of people, containing words they would like to 'make last' and 'contribute […] to the life we all live together’. Thus resounded the common voice, a 'call for hope in a world where one cannot return to what was before, and the time »when all of that is over« will never come'.
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Katarzyna Krakowiak's installation Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers in the Polish Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, 2012, photo: Zachęta National Gallery of Art
The use of words as this work’s medium is a meaningful, and conscious choice, as language plays a key role in Krakowiak-Bałka’s artistic practice. It is through language that the artist conceptualises architecture, postulating that it ought to be understood not as a fixed entity but rather as a 'durative verb', a continuum whose resonance never ceases. On top of that, she examines the social dimension of the functioning of words and verbal messages, as well as their role in building a common space. In her light-sound composition Tomorrow will never come (2016-2017), she placed neon signs with short, evocative slogans (such as 'my blood') inside a gallery, which she then enshrouded with raw sound. The installation constituted a reflection tied directly to language: the 'inflation of verbal signification in the public space; [...] about linguistic and sign manipulations of emotions and needs […] words and signs with which we communicate, but not understand'.
These inquiries eventually led her to lose faith in the power of words in the face of relentless crisis. Her 2021 work It is not night, yet posits raucous laughter as a response to the social turmoil of the time. This community-based project constituted yet another piece centered around material obtained through an open call for contributions – recordings submitted to the artist, which then resounded through the facade of the KunstHalle Bratislava. The polyphony of laughter expressed resistance to the stifling of civil liberties and hope for a future free from patriarchal violence.
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Spatial and sound installation Where does any Miracle start? Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka at Jeu de Paume in Paris, November 8, 2022, photo: Bartek Barczyk/IAM
In her most recent project, Where Does Any Miracle Start? in Jeu de Paume Paris (2022-2023), the artist once again focused on the way non-human actors exert an impact on architecture and its acoustics. The installation in the hall of the building comprises recorded sounds of insects bouncing off the window panes of the edifice as they fly toward light. The sounds of them hitting the panes instantly reverberate between the walls, bounced around like a ball used for the 'je de paume' game, for which purpose the pavilion was constructed in the 19th century. Through this conscious reference, the artist included research on the building’s past into the scope of her work, creating – in the form of models – a speculative reconstruction of the acoustic conditions inside the pavilion at several different points in its history.
Using understated means, Katarzyna Krakowiak creates compositions of a monumental character, which extract depth from architectural spaces and reveal certain truths about them. However, she operates an extended meaning of the concept of space – the ontology of architecture, sound, subject, and community is flattened, and a look through the prism of acoustic blurs the divisions between human and non-human actors, nature and culture. It enables the artist to formulate complex statements concerning key conditions of our reality, not only as a voice of radical realism but also one of hope.
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Dr hab. Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka (b. 1980) graduated in 2006 from the Studio of Sculpture Transplantation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, later transformed into the Studio of Spatial Activities. From 2004 to 2007, she co-ran the Studio of Sculpture Transplantation as the assistant of Professor Mirosław Bałka. In 2013, she obtained her PhD from the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and in 2019 she completed her habilitation (postdoctoral degree) at the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.
What also holds importance for her are her teaching activities. From 2011 to 2019, she worked as a lecturer in the Studio for City Interior Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. From 2019, she ran the Sound Space Studio at the Faculty of Media Art, the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In the academic year 2022/2023, within the same faculty, the Interfaculty Activities Studio was established, run by Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka together with Professor Mirosław Bałka.
The quotations have been sourced from the artist’s website and her summary of professional achievements.
Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny