Karolina Breguła "Fire-followers", 2013, photo courtesy of the artist
The Polish interdisciplinary artist represents Romania at the 55th Venice Biennale with a film that turns art’s treasures into trash, with works of art deposited in the junkyard and museums serving as little more than warehouses.
Breguła’s film Fire-Followers (2013) is presented alongside works of six Romanian artists, with Reflection Centre for Suspended Histories. An Attempt as its theme. An exhibition is shown at the Istituto Romeno di Venezia in the Palazzo Correr, as one of two projects representing Romania at the Venice Biennale.
Her film tells the story of a small town in the north of Europe that has been plagued by intermittent fires throughout its history. The last such disaster took place in the 1950s, and today the energies of most of its residents is been focused on the prevention of yet another episode. The film follows an elderly pair, loathe to part with their nonflammable suits and consistently practising emergency techniques in case of fire, with a trusty pail of water always at hand. Even their dogs have been trained to sniff out flammable materials. There’s also a man carrying on faithful documentation of his home so as to reconstruct it exactly if it were to be demolished in a fire.
Yet the most essential part of Fire-Followers is the townspeople’s approach to art, and their undaunted suspicion that the fires have been a conspiracy on the part of art historians to do away with the old and make way for the art of the new. The title of the film refers to a plant – a variety of bushgrass that grows in areas of poor soil that cannot otherwise support plant life, which usually appears following a fire. For this plant, a fire is a chance at existence – a reference to the disposal of destroyed art works and their storage in warehouses, out of sight. The art world is understood as an exotic, abstruse area of life that is as strange as predator fish swimming in the local aquarium – which also holds a model of Tatlin’s socialist-era Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower, planned in 1919 but never built.
In an interview with Culture.pl, Breguła explained the idea behind her project,
Fire-Followers is a construct in which the spectator will experience some discomfort because he will have to search for meaning. And this meaning is the story that demonstrates the direction art is heading in, and it means to provoke thought on the subject of progress in art, how it evolves and what contributes to this evolution. What would happen if art didn’t have any stimulus to push it forward? In my film, these stimuli cultivate themselves on their own.
Fire-Followers_teaser_PL from touchFILMS on Vimeo
Breguła was invited to join the Romanian team in Venice by Anca Mihuleţ, former curator of the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, whom she met through the Curators’ Network in Kraków in 2012. The project, aimed at stimulating international cooperation among art institutions, curators and artists, was set up in part by Mihuleţ, who found Breguła’s video work an apt addition to her vision for the Romanian Pavilion in Venice for 2013.
Reflection Center for Suspended Histories. An Attempt analyses small, seemingly inconsequential narratives of contemporary art, hovering in the balance between the biggest events of the field. The exhibition space takes on the aspect of a temporary institution, a model of reflection on the meaning of art history and aspects of visibility. The centre is located on the ground floor of the historic Pallazzo Correr, a building that has housed the Romanian Institute of Culture and Research in the Humanities since 1930. As curator Anca Mihuleţ has stated, the works selected for the exhibition have been chosen according to the method used by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his research on antiquity.
The project is accompanied by two publications – a guide to the exhibition in the form of a gazette, including interviews with artists conducted by art historians Luigi Fassi, Anca Rujoiu, Bettina Spörr, Agnieszka Sural, Borbala Szalai and Jürgen Tabor, and a book of critical and theoretical texts by Zdenka Badovinac, Livian Dan, Patrick D. Flores, Ioan Vlasiu and Monika Wucher.
Karolina Breguła (born 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span installations, happenings, videoworks and photography. Her primary focus is the perception of art by the spectator. She conducts research among nonprofessionals in the realm of culture, and examines their relationship to a work of art. She looks for a place for art in the everyday area and the roles that cultural heritage can play in the contemporary world. Building meanings and the auto-analysis of culture have become the foundation of her most recent artistic activities.
She is a graduate of the National Film and Theatre School in Łódź, holding the title of PhD. She has received awards and distinctions including the Samsung Art Master prize, a stipend from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Visegrad Fund. In 2013 she was among the nominees of the prestigious Views competition sponsored by the Deutsche Bank Foundation in Poland. She has created major projects in the public space including Let Them See Us (2003) and the online Bureau for the Translation of Art (2010). Her works have been exhibited across Poland, including exhibitions in Warsaw at the National Museum and at the Centre for Contemporary Art, and at the Art Museum in Kalmar, Sweden, and Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut. She lives and works in Warsaw. For more on the artist, see: karolinabregula.com.
Reflection Center for Suspended Histories. An Attempt takes place at the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia - between the 1st of June – 24th of November 2013 (preview: 29-31.05; opening: 29.05, 7 pm) at the Istituto Romeno di Venezia, Palazzo Correr, Campo Santa Fosca, Cannaregio 2214, Venice.
Featured artists: Apparatus 22, Irina Botea and Nicu Ilfoveanu, Karolina Breguła, Adi Matei, Olivia Mihălţianu, Sebastian Moldovan
Curator: Anca Mihuleţ
Commissioner: Monica Morariu
Deputy Comissioner: Alexandru Damian
This year the Polish Pavilion is represented by Konrad Smoleński and his sound installation Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.
Author: Agnieszka Sural, May 2013. Translated (with edits) by Agnieszka Le Nart
27.05.2013