Miroslaw balka biography

Balka’s bipartite installation was conceived after visits to both the monastery and the museum. In the Edificio Sabatini he has conceived a totally new installation comprised of several components. At Silos he has re-contextualised a formative early work which still remains in his possession some twenty-five years after it was first shown. Visitors access the gallery at the Abbey by descending a small flight of stairs into an antechamber where they see a handle, hanging from the ceiling, but attached to the doorway that leads into the exhibition space proper. That entrance is completely blocked by a dark structure, the backside of what turns out to be a wardrobe. Symbolically if not functionally, the handle becomes a device to access the exhibit beyond. Visitors who push open one of the closet’s two identical doors find themselves on the threshold of a barrel-vaulted room, near the end of which a startling vision appears. A single object, bathed in light, occupies the sombre and otherwise empty chamber: a sculpture of a life-size, seated, black pope accompanied by a black sheep. O

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