193 x 167 x 30

193 × 167 × 30 is an element of a project created by Mirosław Bałka for the Liverpool Biennial in 1999. Apart from the steel net resembling a segmental arch window and pieces of soap stuck in it, the artist also showed a platform made of soap with smoldered drawings hanging on the surrounding walls. All the works constituting the project are focused on the issue of the trace, understood as an object or a material which helps see universal history via the prism of one’s personal experience of reality.

In many of Bałka’s works, the artist has coded his inner experiences connected with the body, identity, and the home, which is a place of special importance to him. His childhood home, and now his studio, is a place the artist finds saturated with memories, safekeeping a private history. At the same time, it is touched with painful traces of the place and times in which the individual experiences and order of time were intertwined with the history of a larger community. In creating his sculptures and installations, Bałka often refers to the dimensions of his own body as a frame holding the experience of the world, and to the dimensions of his house as a confined area of his mental state. His works are thus a reflex of perceiving and understanding the body and home, fragments of a private space transferred into a different context.

For a long time the artist used materials which bore traces of life and had their own biographies, which impacted sight, hearing and smell. Salt, concrete, soap, or dust – a reference to ashes – are related to the personal sphere. They also carried a number of associations with culture, religion, or history and recalled the difficult issues which remind us about the actuality of evil, such as the war and the Holocaust. Bałka leaves much room for understatement and avoids any direct discussions about the problems he is interested in. He sometimes calls his realizations shadows – shadows which never lie at peace, which always drag behind history and which stand guard against its unambiguous interpretation.

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