The lecture will focus on similarities and contrasts between two contemporary artists from Poland, Monika Sosnowska and Miroslaw Balka.
Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972) is a contemporary Polish artist based in Warsaw. Graduate of the Poznan Academy of Fine Arts and the Rejksakademie, Amsterdam, she worked with painting for a short while before turning to three-dimensional mediums and the practice of modifying entire spaces. Using optical illusions, visual and architectural puzzles, intellectual strategies and psychosomatic techniques, Sosnowska transforms familiar or historic environments, breaking the visitor’s associations and anticipations thereof. In 2007 she represented Poland at the 52nd Venice Biennale with an architectural intervention into the country’s national pavilion built in 1932. She is a regular contributor to major group exhibitions, including the Istanbul, Shanghai and Prague biennials, and has dozens of solo shows to her name.
Author of How It Is—an installation from Tate Modern’s prestigious Unilever Series of commissions, Miroslaw Balka (b. 1958) is a Polish sculptor, graphic and video artist, and teacher at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In his sculptural practice he uses a wide range of popular modern materials, from stone and concrete to fiber foam and felt, as well as found and everyday objects, approaching the traumatic experience of global and local history, and in particular, the Holocaust and World War II. His video works also investigate these and similar subjects. Member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, participant of Documenta and, on many occasions, the Venice Biennale, Balka regularly exhibits his works at personal and group shows worldwide. In 2013 his solo exhibition was held at Moscow’s Center for Contemporary Art Winzavod.
