Miroslaw Balka’s installation How It Is currently fills the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Perspective and identity fade as you disappear into the vast steel container, enfolded in a desensitising darkness. The Polish artist presents an excellent foil to this piece with his video-based exhibition Topography.
The first piece, Carrousel, sets the viewer in the middle of four large projectors playing whirling footage of a disused military base. You can sense immediately that this was once a concentration camp. The whistling of the wind past the video camera transports the viewer, who, glancing from one screen to the next, comes to feel part of the artist’s filmic process.
The footage spins around the barracks ever faster until it reaches a crescendo of disorientating intensity. Carrousel feels like a frantic search for meaning. You strain to impose some sort of narrative, but the looping video undermines any attempts to fix and comprehend the images presented. Balka seems to suggest that the atrocities of the Holocaust cannot be rationalised, but that it is the duty of the artist to record them nonetheless. As a final tease, the al-Jazeera logo is painted beside the far projector. Connotations spiral off in every direction – witness reliability, religious tension between East and West – and any stable interpretation is undone.
Such indeterminacy is crucial to Flagellare A, B, and C. The artist has filmed himself whipping a reflected beam of light onto a concrete floor, then projecting the footage onto three rectangular salt beds. The first is placed by itself; with the sound turned off, the low radiance of projection gently illuminates the room.
The other two are set in a small room to the side, and the effect is entirely different. The harsh crack of the whip, now at full volume, has an aggressive, unsettling rhythm. The positioning of the salt beds creates an awkward path between the two, and there is a real sense of claustrophobia. Is this a futile act of exorcism, or do the Christian references point towards a redemptive value? These questions apply throughout an exhibition so heavily influenced by the Holocaust.
In the main room, whose atmosphere is at once solemn and chaotic, Bambi toys with ideas of innocence and knowledge. We see a herd of deer playing in the snow around the buildings of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the video focuses, it becomes clear that we are watching from behind a barbed wire fence, the jagged lines dissecting the field of view. Balka develops the black humour in Carrousel, revelling in the perversion of childhood associations. But there is something more profound at work. The film Bambi was made in 1942 while deer still roamed uncomprehending through the Birkenau woods as the trains full of prisoners arrived. The juxtaposition of the banal and the terrible reminds us that, for all this suffering, life goes on regardless. It is hardly a comforting thought.
Topography belies Adorno’s claim that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. This is hauntingly beautiful work, and puts Pawel Althamer’s lacklustre Common Task in the shade.
Topography is at Modern Art Oxford. Admission is free.
