Karolina Breguła: The Waves Are Rumbling So Loud

The Waves Are Rumbling So Loud, a solo exhibition by Polish artist Karolina Breguła, features the artist’s newly commissioned video installations, The Fish and The Storm, alongside her earlier moving-image works and photographs that share the same concerns and conceptual queries.

Breguła is a storyteller who works in a deeply research-based and collective manner, digging deep into questions of architecture, societal shifts, and urban spaces that affect communities. The exhibition revolves around a poetic and rather troubling account of the collective experiences of and reflections on the condition of the seas in the face of the climate crisis.

The Storm portrays an image of the sea and a distant island observed by five characters who reveal their most hidden emotions as the destructive wind and waves grow bigger. The threatening weather uncovers social tensions and conflicts within the small community, which seems to be unprepared to face the coming dangers together.

Through her extensive and experimental film language, the artist creates situations in which collective storytelling becomes possible. Breguła considers collaborative fiction writing a political activity that supports the process of diagnosing, expressing, and discussing societal problems.

The artist’s latest film, The Fish, imagines the poetic transformation of a fisherwoman into a sea being. After she comes to understand the severe condition of her beloved sea, the protagonist rather abruptly changes her alliances and decides to stay under the water’s surface.

The film adapts one of the stories from Breguła’s ongoing collection of tales of communities facing serious disturbances caused by the climate crisis and the devastation of the sea. Its narrative is based on the life experience of a Swedish fisherwoman, Manjula, with whom the artist worked closely, not just as a protagonist but also as a co-creator of the story. Many of Breguła’s film projects—which demonstrate a rich filmic language and elaborated conceptual approaches—are co-created with their protagonists and participants, blurring the boundaries between professional and amateur artistic activity. Short stories collaboratively written by Breguła and the participants of her projects are also included in the exhibition.

Her earlier featured works—such as Dust (2019) and The Tower (2016)—portray the clash between the desires of individual lives within an oppressive societal and urban structure.

Dust follows two women living in an old district marked for demolition, from which all their neighbors have already left. The film is a slow and troubling portrait of the two women, who are determined to stay in the abandoned building, as they observe the methodical deconstruction of their neighborhood as bulldozers roar around them. The project documents the real life struggle of Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang from Banqiao, in New Taipei City, who fought alongside their neighbors against the evictions in the district.

The opera musical The Tower is about the inhabitants of a block of concrete flats who are planning to construct a sugar tower in their district. The rather absurd and upsetting story of this utopian project alludes to postwar residential architecture, analyzing it from the perspective of its users and inhabitants rather than its creators and architecture historians. Memories of desires, dreams, and beliefs for a better future are confronted with hard reality and the contradictions inherent in modernist designs.

Karolina Breguła was the 2023 recipient of the Media Art Grant from the Stiftung Niedersachsen at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art. The recent works in the exhibition were produced in partnership with Artlink (Ireland), Institute for Urban Research (Malmö University), Polska Institutet i Stockholm, Fotoaura Institute of Photography (Taiwan).