Collection

visual artist, filmmaker, photographer, author installations, and social activities. She is a graduate of the National Film School in Łódź, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2016. She creates narratives about art, architecture, and urban spaces, which serve as the realm for her anthropological and sociological observations. In her work, she tells stories. For several years, she has practiced collective fiction writing, which she considers her political activity supporting the processes of diagnosing, expressing, and discussing social issues. Her works have been exhibited in institutions such as the Jewish Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA Taipei, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and at international events like the Venice Biennale and the Singapore Biennale. She is the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards, including the "Spojrzenia" award, the EMAF festival award, the Golden Paw at the Gdynia Film Festival, among others. She works at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. Since the fall of 2023, she has been co-running Lokatorne— a space for anti-disciplinary activities—together with Weronika Fibich. She lives and works in Warsaw. 

You won't get a chance to see the main characer in the film. It's a statue, hidden in a dense bush in the middle of a square. Local inhabitants don't remember if there actually is a statue in the square, and what exactly it commemorates—until one day, a soft voice speaks from the shrubs. The song of the sculpture, pleasant at the beginning, starts to raise anxiety when the lyrics become audible: "I'd like to ask you a question". When an invitation to the conversation becomes too insistent to further ignore it, the anxiety turns into collective aggression. The small community doesn't want to get confrontet with the past—the questions that scares everyone won't get a change to be asked.
Karolina Breguła mixes styles and disturbs narrative order; staged scenes from Taiwanese Tainan are intertwined with a documentary-style footage recorded at an Asian market in Warsaw. In these shots, the artists herself appears – to confess her own helplessness in face of the challenge she sets for herself. Square is a universal story of the mechanics of collective memory (or lack thereof). Every community, no matter the geological location, has to face the fear of the past and take responsability for history.