Poetry is hidden in everyday life, not in heaven or underground.
Miroslaw Balka
Solomon Shereshevsky, a 20th-century Russian mnemonist, was capable of astonishing feats of memory, verging on the Borgesianly fictional but nonetheless fully and clinically verified as fact. Yet as mind-boggling as those feats of recall were, a different aspect of Shereshevsky’s experience of his own mind is also particularly striking: his commensurate incapacity to forget. Prodigious memory became for Shereshevsky a psychological burden as much as a mental gift, not only trapping him in an ever-present and ever-expanding past, but even preventing him from understanding basic things such as the meaning of the word “nothing.” Indeed, at one point in his ill-fated life, Shereshevsky attempted to devise a technique not for memorization but rather a technique to forget. This technique consisted of writing the memories he hoped to expunge on scraps of paper and then setting those scraps on fire, staring at the words as they burned into cinders: a Memory Palace reduced to a pile of Forgetting’s Ashes. It is a poignant image, a man seated at a table, staring at a heap of words turned shriveled ash, trying desperately to forget. But it was not successful; memory, though charred, remained. For Shereshevsky, it was not he who held memory; it was memory that held him.
The notion of a release from memory, along with a release of memory, runs throughout Miroslaw Balka’s exhibition LOS OLVIDOS (The Forgettings), currently on view at the Galería Elba Benítez. As is habitual in Balka’s practice, the exhibition consists of works that span a variety of formats: sculpture, drawing, collage, painting and participatory installation. The works are for the most part anchored in the material existence of everyday objects, lending them a declarative-like directness. Yet this directness, again in keeping with Balka’s signature practice, carries within it a more indirect and open-ended poetry, a poetry achieved through a combination of conceptual nuance and assured technique that goes beyond specific medium.
For instance, the works on view in LOS OLVIDOS share, in varying degrees of explicitness, the motif of the threshold, a motif manifested either positively or negatively throughout the exhibition: in the metonymy of doormats of the exhibition’s eponymous installation Los olvidos; via the reference to the transformative Greek mythological river-crossing of the afterlife in the imposing yet graceful charcoal drawing River Lethe; as a mobile hand-railing in search of a passage to which to provide guidance in Looking for the Stars; as a darkly suggestive chain-link fence in Window Towards the Night; and even in the presence of that most delicate of thresholds, the eye, in AF/Hidden (with its less-than-hidden reference to Anne Frank and the tragic act of hidden witness she even to this day continues to implicate us in.)
Thresholds, by nature, are sites of arrival and departure, inviting and entailing passage; in LOS OLVIDOS, memory itself becomes a threshold, a site of both arrival and departure. Memory is something we gain, and it also something we lose, something we release, and something we are released from. As Solomon Sheleshevsky held and was held by memory, we both leave, and are left by, memory. Memory, to become memory, must arrive from somewhere else; and that which arrives, departs. And as to memory, so to those fragile, transient bundles of memories that are ourselves, and our selves. Hence the ultimate forgetting of Miroslaw Balka’s LOS OLVIDOS.
George Stolz
