This work by Miroslaw Balka is a camouflaged reference to a quote from Shoah, a film by Claude Lanzmann:

Lanzmann: Do you know how many Jews were exterminated there?

Frau Michelsohn: Four something, 400 000… 40 000…?

Lanzmann: 400 000.

Frau Michelshon: 400 000, yes. I knew it had a four in it.

The work, typically of the artist, undermines our superficial knowledge of the world and suggests that immediately underneath the surface of things lurks evil denied. The artist believes his task is to indicate and revive painful memories, and to continuously exercise remembering.

Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland where he lives and works. Comprising installation, sculpture and video, Balka’s work has a bare and elegiac quality that is underlined by the careful, minimalist placement of objects, as well as the gaps and pauses between them. Balka’s work deals with both personal and collective memories, especially as they relate to his Catholic upbringing and the collective experience of Poland’s fractured history. Through this investigation of domestic memories and public catastrophe, he explores how subjective traumas are translated into collective histories and vice versa. His materials are simple, everyday objects and things, but also powerfully resonant of ritual, hidden memories and the history of Nazi occupation in Poland.
Balka uses height, gravity, distance, and continuous space in order to approach the necessity of understanding remembrance and memory itself. He brings the viewer in to a position of experience and absorption and as less of an observer and more of a witness. Realizing the importance behind sculptures relative to monuments and memorials, embracing fear and crossing thresholds, approaching an infinite search; whether it is to escape, or find the missing pieces/letters in order to reach an understanding. Balka creates a space where it is pertinent to acknowledge what it means to remember.