Karolina Balcer

Public space and attempts to claim it and adapt it to one’s own needs are a frequent topic of Karolina Balcer’s installations. In The Private Land, she temporarily fenced a square of several metres in a public park; in The Shortcut, she marked out a passage for pedestrians to shorten their way through the grass; in Fencing, she reflected the way visitors to Polish seaside resorts fence their places on the beach with wind screens to actually secure their privacy. Using simple and straightforward means and a certain amount of humour, Karolina Balcer critically focuses on current social topics, but also on issues of human character or established behaviour patterns. For the Cuckoo, Balcer created A City Living Room, an installation in which she looks at the city’s public space from the perspective of a homeless person. The term hostile architecture or – as its creators call it – defensive architecture refers to elements on urban furniture that make it impossible to lie down or sit comfortably. These are usually spikes or protrusions on flat surfaces, sometimes a deliberate design of benches to prevent them from being used for lying or sleeping. All these elements are placed in public space primarily to drive out the homeless from exposed places in the city. On the other hand, the installation A City Living Room aims to give urban furniture a more human character and, using brightly coloured hand-sewn bench covers, to create a counterpart to hostile architecture. From the point of view of homeless people, the city serves as a “house”. A bench is turned into a bed, a shop into a refrigerator, a station into a living room, a fountain into a bathroom. The town hall, in front of which the installation is located, then symptomatically becomes a place of residence for them. The installation should at least temporarily evoke the feeling that public space can be inhabited or even made homely, and that its character should be primarily inclusive, not exclusive.