‘How It Is’
by James Mercer
The current commission in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern is titled ‘How It Is’. Conceived and designed by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka, the exhibit is a giant grey steel structure, enclosing a vast dark chamber. Hovering somewhere between sculpture and architecture, on 2 metre stilts, it stands 13 metres high and 30 metres long. Visitors can walk underneath it, accompanied by echoing footsteps on the unyielding steel above, or enter via a ramp into its pitch-black interior.
Informing the creation of this chamber are allusions to recent Polish and European history – the ramp at the entrance to the Ghetto in Warsaw, or the trucks which took Jews away to the camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz, or the claustrophobic containers within which immigrants are illegally smuggled over national borders.
By entering the dark space, visitors display considerable trust in both the artist and his structure. Once inside the box, the visitor can see nothing. No end is insight. The walls and ceiling cannot be discerned. Only the unseen, harshly- metallic floor offers any tactile security.
Balka engineers an experience for visitors that is both personal and collective; engendering sensory and emotional experiences through sound; contrasting light and shade; individual experience and awareness of others. Fabricating apprehension, menace, excitement, intrigue.
And yet, having entered the darkness once and emerged safely from it, the consuming shadow looses its ability to terrify. To enter once and to return enables one to assist others to emerge from the incoherent void.
As we journey through Epiphany, and through Lent to the new beginning that is Easter, we journey in the company of the truly human one who was to go before us to face the darkness, uncertainty and terror of death - on our behalf. He was to absorb the shade and return. May we find in him the confidence to face towards an unknown future, secure in the hope ofresurrection.
Jesus said to [Martha], ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live. John 11:25
James Mercer is the Associate Minister within the Benefice of St Aldhelm, Purbeck.