You’re must be getting bored of waiting, huh? But it’s changing faster than ever before, really, says the protagonist of Karolina Breguła’s latest work. Dressed in a fox fur coat, sporting a bag from a global retail chain over the shoulder, and holding a water level gauge, she wanders through the wetlands. In her endless monologue, she reminds us of melting glaciers, extinction of species, acid rain, and dramatically rising temperatures.
The titular Weird Rain is a film created for the exhibition at TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. It draws inspiration from Timothy Morton’s philosophy and his concept of “being caught in a loop” – a system devoid of hierarchy, cause and effect, beginning and end. The work also reflects Donna Haraway’s theory on cohabitation, coevolution, and the modalities of interspecies sociability here and now.
The exhibition also features a few older works and three new video installations that have never been shown in Poland before. The centerpiece is the five-channel film installation The Storm, created in Northern Ireland in 2024, and the three-channel Dust, produced in Taiwan in 2021. In both works, the characters await the arrival of disaster.
In her artistic practice, Breguła explores the experiences of people facing social tensions, wars and the climate crisis. She follows the fate of Taiwanese houses set for demolition, observes floods caused by rising sea levels, and documents the story of a Swedish fisherwoman navigating a sea where there are no more fish. The relationships of Breguła’s protagonists seem to reflect a loss of social bonds, security and trust in media narratives. They are accompanied by a deep sense of unease about the looming catastrophe.
Breguła searches for a language that will allow us to understand and describe the dynamically changing reality; to illustrate a time of chaos and destruction without losing hope; to initiate collective reflection. The method she uses is collaboration, collective storytelling, and offering excuses for being together.
The architecture of the exhibition was created not only to experience art but also to enable meetings and conversations. Designed in collaboration with Muh Crew, the installation has been created from remnants of set design and displays found in cultural institutions in Szczecin.
Karolina Breguła (born 1979) – visual artist, filmmaker, photographer, creator of installations and social projects. In her practice, she tells stories, crafting narratives about art, architecture, and urban spaces, which serve as the focus of her anthropological and sociological observations. For several years, she has practiced collective fiction writing, which she considers a political activity that supports the process of diagnosing, expressing, and discussing social issues. Her works have been exhibited at a number of museums and galleries worldwide: the Jewish Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, as well as at international art festivals, including the Venice Biennale and the Singapore Biennale. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Views Award, the EMAF Festival Award, and the Złoty Pazur Award (Golden Claw) at the Gdynia Film Festival. Lecturer at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. Since the fall of 2023, she has co-run (together with Weronika Fibich) the space for anti-disciplinary activities Lokatorne. She is affiliated with the gallery lokal_30. Karolina Breguła lives and works in Szczecin.
Agata Chinowska (born 1979) – graduate of Art History and Hungarian Philology at the University of Warsaw. She completed the Postgraduate Museum Curatorial Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Curator at the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok in the years 2014-18. She has curated a number of exhibitions and events. In 2024, she founded the AA+ Contemporary Art Foundation, which she co-runs with painter Agata Borowa.
