Miroslaw Balka’s Retrospective Spans Five Decades of Memory
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Podgorica opens a sweeping survey of the Polish artist's practice, tracing personal and collective narratives through sculpture, installation and drawing across nearly fifty years.
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The exhibition ‘1978/2026/Otwock+’ unfolds as a meditation on the accumulation of lived experience, each work a deposit in the archaeology of one artist’s relentless interrogation of form, memory and the spaces we inhabit. Miroslaw Balka’s practice, surveyed comprehensively at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Podgorica, moves through nearly five decades with the gravity of someone bearing witness to the layers of history that shape both individual lives and collective consciousness.
From early figurative works to monumental sculptures and site specific installations, the exhibition charts a trajectory that refuses easy categorisation. The pieces speak to one another across time, creating a constellation of moments, materials and meditations that collectively map the territories of migration, family, community and the darker episodes of historical violence. This is art that does not turn away from difficulty; rather, it meets it with rigour and an almost sculptural precision.
Across Two Venues
Presented across the museum’s two venues, the exhibition gains additional resonance through its geographical and conceptual expansiveness. Works created specifically for Podgorica sit alongside pieces from earlier periods, suggesting how an artist’s vision can speak anew when transplanted into different contexts, different light, different air. The drawings and installations converse with the sculptures, creating dialogues between materials and scales, between the intimate and the monumental.
Balka’s work has always possessed a kind of archaeological quality, as though each piece were excavating something buried within the body, the city, the nation or the soul. The themes that course through this retrospective are the ones that have animated his practice since 1978: the ways in which the personal becomes political, how memory lodges itself in materials and spaces, what it means to belong and to be displaced, to remember and to forget.
The exhibition remains a powerful statement about the capacities of contemporary art to hold complexity, to resist the impulse toward comfortable narratives, and to insist on the viewer’s engagement with the difficult, necessary work of reckoning with what has been lived and what has been lost.
Imagery courtesy of White Cube (@whitecube).
