The details of the tenth Turbine Hall commission were kept strictly under wraps until its opening on the 13th October. But now, unveiled, stands what the Daily Mail are calling a “giant black hole” – and for once, they are not far wrong. 

The “black hole”, or, How It Is, by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is a massive steel construction that fills the hall, and heightens the industrial atmosphere of the Tate Modern. From the outside it looks like a shipping container on steel stilts; from underneath it looks like an ominous railway track, stretching into the distance. A ramp takes you closer and closer to a vast, black edge that looks like it might really be a rip in the fabric of space. The walls inside are lined with a felt that absorbs five times more light than ordinary black paint: the very air you are swallowing is jet-black. It is unsettling and delicious – and, if you can ignore the screaming schoolchildren around you – it is a radically unique experience. But – hold on – let’s not get carried away about how cool this is. Anish Kapoor does ‘cool’, but creating ‘ooh’-factor has never been Balka’s game. So far, the media have tended to focus on the awesomeness of the black hole experience, as if it were a theme park ride. But it is clear this work can only be interpreted by looking at the artist’s continual referencing of memories, both collective and familial, of suffering and oppression during and after the Second World War. 

The Samuel Beckett novel from which Balka’s installation takes its name sheds some light on this darkness. The character of Beckett’s novel crawls through unending mud.  Recited, in a constant murmur, are memories of his past: “things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud.” The intention behind Bałka’s darkness seems to be that it should similarly surround us, to the point where it starts to seep inside.

Balka is not normally an artist of large, nearly formless works: on the contrary, he is a collector by nature, and his art, apart from sharing the steely industrial quality of How It Is, is normally very piecemeal.  Balka’s art is usually a domestic, eclectic affair, using a variety of materials.  His studio is packed with memory-laden materials for use in his work – a photograph of his mother, frayed labels from cheap wine he drank when growing up near Warsaw. These are beautifully combined in an almost therapeutic recycling process, as Bałka creates personal objects that reflect Poland’s past more generally. This past is a painful one: working and creating art through the impossible times of the Soviet Union, such recycling was once, for Balka, a matter of necessity rather than choice.

Balka also refers frequently to the horrors of the concentration camp at Treblinka. In the artist’s home town of Otwock there are still those who can recall the day when 8,000 Jews were forced to Otwock station to be taken to this camp. For Poles – who have only been allowed to discuss their own history freely (and accurately) since the fall of communism twenty years ago, WWII is not so far away.

Balka’s art lies in an evocative reflection of scars: his works are memorials.  While his Turbine Hall work has a new simplicity of form, his concerns remain unchanged. Balka would normally articulate the memories of the people of Poland through materials such as ash, soap, salt, and cloth. In this work it is the darkness that is thick with memories and meanings. These memories which Beckett heard “murmur them in the mud” have been packed up by Balka, so that they have become unspeakable.