The Freud Museum London is pleased to present an exhibition of new site-specific works by Polish artist, Miroslaw Balka. This will be the artist’s first show in London since ‘How It Is’, the Unilever Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, London in 2009.

Entitled ‘Die Traumdeutung 75,32m AMSL’, the exhibition will run concurrently with Die Traumdeutung 25,31m AMSL’, at White Cube Mason’s Yard. The title of both exhibitions relates to the original German title of Sigmund Freud’s classic work The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). For Balka, the German title carries significant words and meanings from other languages: English ‘Die’ and ‘Trauma’; Latin, ‘Deu’ which means ‘God’, and Albanian ‘Tung’, which means ‘Bye’. The measurements in the title indicates the exact geographical height in metres above sea level of Freud Museum London and White Cube Mason’s Yard.

Balka's work is imbued with gravity and with the metaphorical and physical weight or presence of the body. Underpinned by the collective memory of recent history, his work often employs poignant materials that evoke temperature, light or an olfactory sense as well as having a strong visual symbolism. In this exhibition, the themes of surface and depth, ‘above’ and ‘beneath’ are treated as both a physical and mental landscape. The exhibition also points to questions of ‘pollution’ and how history can leave traces in the form of artifacts and scars on the landscape and our collective response to them.

Outside the Freud Museum, Balka will install an imposing inflatable 8-metre high black tower entitled Y-Chromosomal Adam, which provides an aura of dark foreboding that pervades his exhibition within Freud’s house.

Inside the entrance hall there is a video Nacht und Nebel that was shot during a foggy night this January in a forest near the artist’s studio. Nacht-und-Ne-bel-Ak-ti-on was a secret Nazi operation started in 1941. The name of this action was taken from Richard Wagner‘s opera Das Rheingold (1876) where the dwarf Alberich, who has renounced love for the pursuit of power, disappears by putting on the magic helmet Tarnhelm and intoning the sentence: Nacht und Nebel, niemand gleich / Siehst du mich, Bruder? (Night and fog, like to no one / Can you see me brother?)

The main exhibition space presents the sculptural installation We still need, which comprises a careful arrangement of plywood crates and a truncated trapezohedron, open on one side and the bottom, so that visitors can put their head into it. This is inspired in part by the enigmatic trapezohedron in Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving Melencolia 1 (1514), while it also has a relation with the Tarnhelm.

The number and volume of crates relates to SS officer Imfried Eberl’s 1942 letter sent to the commissioner of the Jewish Quarter, Warsaw Ghetto, requesting materials for the camp in Treblinka. Sent on 20 June 1942, the seemingly mundane request becomes grave in this context since, three months later, one of Freud’s sisters died there.

Sigmund Freud moved to London from Vienna in 1938 to avoid Nazi persecution but four of his five sisters died concentration camps in 1942. In his civilian role Imfried Eberl was an Austrian psychiatrist.

The last work in the exhibition is the sound of a lone man whistling the melody of the theme tune from the film The Great Escape (1963).

All images Die Traumdeutung 75,32m AMSL, Freud Museum London, 2014, © Miroslaw Balka, Photo: Jack Hems, Courtesy White Cube