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Karolina Bregula

Dust

Fiction expérimentale | mov | couleur | 21:45 | Pologne, Taiwan | 2021

Dust is a story about two women living in an old district earmarked for demolition. Since their building is due to be demolished soon, all the neighbours have already left. Yet, the women decide to stay in their flat. The protagonists spend time in the abandoned multi-storey building and observe through the window bulldozers working around. Four out of five films were made in collaboration with Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang from Daguan in Taipei. When the project was in production, their houses in Daguan were bound for demolition while Ms. Zou, Ms. Huang together with their neighbours kept fighting against the evictions in the district. The first two films are a fictive story staged with Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang in an empty building awaiting demolition in central Taipei. I entered the building, cleaned up and furnished one chosen flat to turn it into a friendly liveable space and used it as a film location. Another two films are a conversation between Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang, Ms. Huang singing a sad song which reminds her of home and an image of a Daguan streets. The last film is a documentation of the demolition of the house where the first two films were made. One month after the films were done, Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang were forced to move away and Daguan was demolished.

Karolina Bregu?a (b. 1979) is a visual artist, a graduate of the National Film School in ?ód?. She creates films, photographs, installations and performance. Her work explores the problems of the status of the artwork and the materiality of art objects. She critically scrutinises contemporary art and its reception. She creates stories about art and architecture, which are a field of her anthropological and sociological observations. She is interested in the connection between art and reality – the favourable and detrimental effect of artists’ work, the remedial and destructive force of artistic activity, rituals connected to art and art’s social role. Many of her works are co-created with their protagonists and participants, blurring the border lines between professional and amateur artistic activity. Her works have been exhibited at institutions such as National Museum in Warsaw, Jewish Museum in New York and MOCA Taipei and at international events such as Venice Art Biennale and Singapore Biennale. She is the winner of the second prize in the Views 2013 Deutsche Bank Foundation Award, the third Samsung Art Master 2007 award and the 2016 Golden Claw at the Gdynia Film Festival. Her works are included in collections such as Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Zach?ta National Gallery of Art, Wroclaw Contemporary Museum and ING Polish Art Foundation. She is an associate professor at Academy of Art in Szczecin, she collaborates with lokal_30 Gallery. She lives in Warsaw.