Hot topic: Mirosław Bałka on putting Trump-style walls in a gallery heated to 45C

Andrew Dickson , The Guardian , January 24, 2019
His black box brought a shiver of death to the Tate Turbine Hall. Now the Polish sculptor has created some vast barriers – and cranked up the heat to protein-killing levels.
 
If you enter White Cube’s space in central London, you will encounter not a series of sculptures but an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. One gallery will be barricaded with a corrugated steel wall, penning you in to a space just a few metres square; downstairs there’s another wall, even larger and more forbidding. The main thing you’re likely to notice is that the rooms are hot. Bałka has often inserted heating elements into his sculptures. He explains that the temperature he has selected is 45C, warm enough to kill proteins. He smiles wryly. “So on the one side, pleasure, then also death.”
 
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