"Obraza” ("Affront") is Karolina Breguła's latest film, commissioned by Warsztaty Kultury as part of the "Grodzka 5" Project. The film was co-produced by Warsztaty Kultury (Lublin) and the Zachęta Gallery (Warsaw). "Obraza" will be also screened during "Spojrzenia 2013"/"Views 2013" - the Prize of the Deutsche Bank Foundation.
The film is a short-length video containing elements of the grotesque. This is an ambiguous story of an office clerk obsessed with modernity. The provincial town in which he works seems to be the last bastion of tradition and xenophobia, omni-fear of everything and everybody that could be even vaguely suggestive of the new and the unknown. To wake up the residents out of their retrograde stupor, the clerk decides to apply an unprecedented method. Drawing of people's fallibility and contrariness, he invents coercive rules and limiting regulations that the residents, as he suspects, will try to break and weasel out of.
The film is inscribed onto the ideas behind the "Grodzka 5" project as it focuses on the issues of site-specific memory (the site in question being the Grodzka 5 building in Lublin's OldTown) and on fictional narratives created on the basis of historical facts. In her work, Karolina Breguła discusses alternative history, parallel lives, and potentiality, which might have happened on-site.
The screening will be followed up by a Q and A with Karolina Breguła.
Obraza, running time: 20’, 2013
script and direction: Karolina Breguła
photography: Robert Mleczko
sound: Weronika Raźna
language: Hungarian (Polish and English subtitles)
Karolina Breguła (b. 1979) – multimedia artist, author of installations, happenings, video art, and photography. Graduate of the State Higher Film, Theatre, and TV School in Łódź, where she is currently enrolled as a doctoral student. She performed and exhibited in many institutions and museums, including: The National Museum in Warsaw, the Centre for Contemporary Art - Ujzadowski Castle in Warsaw, the Centre for Contemporary Art - Łaźnia in Gdańsk, the Art Museum in Kalmar (Sweden), Real Art Ways in Hartford (USA). She is a recipient of numerous art awards, including Samsung Young Master, Young Poland/Młoda Polska Stipend, Videgrad Stipend. She is the author of a number of projects, among others Formy Przestrzenne wobec katastrofy/Spatial Forms in the Face of a Disaster (2013), Fire-Followers (2013), Biuro tłumaczeń sztuki/Art Translation Agency (2010) czy Niech nas zobaczą/Let Us Be Seen (2003).
In 2012 Breguła conducted and organised a performative interdisciplinary conference at the El Gallery in Elbląg. In 2013 she had a solo exhibition at the Atlas Gallery in Łódź. She lives and works in Warsaw. Currently, she is an artist-in-residence in Hungary as part of the Artist Quarter Budapest project. As a critical artist, she is primarily interested in the issues of art reception. She studies non-professional audiences and their relations with works of art. She is also researching whether there is space/place for art in everyday life and looking into the roles that heritage may play at present. Construction of meanings, self-reflexivity and the auto-analysis of culture constitute the logic behind her current art endeavours.