Disorientated, a nostalgia-inducing sensory whirlpool collides with the onset of a sort of cattle-shed claustrophobia.
The effects of the first video work in Modern Art Oxford’s new Miroslaw Balka show, Carroussel, come on like one’s too-young first-go on the Waltzers, with all the accompanying tears and fear. The work encircles you, spinning chaotically: a barren, luckless landscape thrown across all four-walls of the gallery space with none of the dizzying merriment of youthful exuberance. None of the ethereal joy of spinning in meadows remains when the terra firma is stripped of its humanity.
Indeed the title of this work’s relation to the piece induced in me thoughts of both the uncomfortably teenage atmosphere of fairgrounds – all lost innocence, cigarette smoke, stolen change and brazen neons – and the mechanisation of the meat industry, its seedy slaughter(ware)house underbelly seen one 100 revolving meat hooks at a time.
Miroslaw Balka, Carroussel
The disturbance of one’s comfort zone is Balka’s raison d’être, and his reasons for so doing have been written about at length. Suffice it to say that my ability to even begin talking about these works in relation to Polish and Jewish history c. 1945 would be a calamity. You are better off reading the MOA press release as a starting point, and take your interest from there. (http://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/Press/112). My intention here is to talk of a more general point about the way these works play with our senses, and my personal reaction to the works.
Miroslaw Balka, Flagellare A, B, C
Be it in the violent outbursts heard below us in the work Flagellare A, B, C, where three floor mounted screens appear to look up at us, draw us down, and then join our downward gaze down at itself concurrently, or in the large quivering video entitled Bambi, where a number of deer enter into a snowy, industrial landscape and look up and around, at us occasionally, we constantly feel like witness. There is nothing voyeuristic in our presence, but our experience of these works is infused with discomfort, a sense that we are privy to something unexplained, or denying explanation. Even resisting explanation.
Miroslaw Balka, Bambi
Similarly, the monumental video work Pond appears still, a lacklustre depiction of an icy pond surrounded by trees. Yet the stillness is by no means calm. There is an uneasiness about it, reminiscent to me of the Tom Waits song What’s He Building in There? from the superb Mule Variations album. Something is being depicted and we don’t know what. There is something we’re not being told. Why?
Miroslaw Balka, Pond
The exhibition’s title, Topography, presents another set of questions. Imponderables. Are such uncertain and seemingly incomplete depictions of landscape and place analogous with the exactitudes of topography? If not, what is Balka getting at? Can mapping such inexactitudes provide us with something more worthwhile than their scientifically robust counterpart? Are we to “map” these works in the sense that they need a thoroughgoing analysis to seek out what’s been missed? Is there something which needs to be found.
In the week that Kings College London decided to axe the country’s last remaining chair of Palaeography – the study of ancient manuscripts – it would seem that the unknowns provide as much larger scope for understanding ourselves and society than knowledge as it exists today manages to. The continuing quest for answers and, importantly, the absolute necessity to explore new terrain rears it head only when our current set of answers seem wholly insubstantial.
The world we once knew was graspable. Now, I can’t fathom how children begin to reconcile the size of the world available to them with the size of their back yard. In this exhibition, I found my own childhood experiences cast against a world of doubt and a fear of what lies beyond. These works seem to understand and approach incommensurability. As such, they become part and parcel of knowledge, one that moves forwards and backwards, with both hindsight and hope.
ALMF 
