BOGNA BURSKA Movies

Opening: 24.02.2012, opening hour: 18.00

Open until: 16.03.2012

Fragment of an essay by Sebastian Cichocki entitled The World is Full of Images, Let’s Stop Creating New Ones. Found Footage Films by Bogna Burska.

Bogna Burska – visual artist working in the field of photography, film and installations. Since 2004 she has been making found footage films created as a result of artistic experiments with the “discovered material”. Burska creates collages composed of samples of film narrations, an incredibly “ductile” material which can form cubes with new qualities (a new image emerges from the two old ones like a rabbit pulled unexpectedly out of a hat). The face of a famous actor, a battle scene with cavalry, a racist anecdote, a prison fugitive and Christ seducing us in his in suffering, a dignified figure of Elisabeth I, people floating above the ground, blood marks, etc.

There is enough material to tell a completely new story assembled from recognizable elements. However, Burska’s work with the appropriated fragments is not governed by chance. The puzzles she meticulously puts together eventually become her own films exploring the hypnotising and overpowering effect cinema has on the viewers. Burska constructs her works around motifs popular in literature and history: sacrifice, love that leads to tragedy, crime, etc. The real world gets recreated in cinema. It is manifested in the relentless recycling of old films, remaking them, producing new versions of the stories about the favourite heroes of the western culture, some of whom, like Jesus Christ, the Count of Monte Cristo or Elisabeth I, Burska herself also refers to. As a result, we find ourselves burdened with numerous images of New York, an endless number of Parises and a multiplying number of Warsaws (that keep being destroyed and rebuilt all over again) in our head. Each story can be told in various styles, even if it is based on some vulgar hoax.

Cinema enables us to not only modify the world, play it in fast forward (anticipation of the future) and rewind (sentimental time travels), but also to “programme” it according to easy to decode patterns and scenarios. Bogna Burska is searching for evidence that will expose the fictitious character of both worlds, the one created by cinema, but also our ordinary life unconsciously imitating the onscreen one. Burska’s cinema is crafted from our dreams and phantasies, affection and perversion. She analyses film materials conveying the cinematic dreams in order to extract and put together, in surprising combinations, fragments that will provide what excites us the most in cinema: watching other people suffer. Those films, constructed meticously from “raw materials” have something catastrophic abut them. They breed on misery and seduce us at the same time. Led by the intuition of an erudite, Burska picks fragments from the immense cinematic archives (skilfully moving from a world classic to a film which did not necessarily win critics’ approval) and brings to life new hybrid narrations. The effects of her ten-year work with images, a peculiar vivisection conducted on films, can be perceived as an attempt to revive this quite predictable medium. Implanting fragments of a film into another one (A Very Bad Dream of Count Monte Cristo, 2006-2007) or gluing together pieces of many different films to create a fairly coherent story reveals the great potential of cinema as the storage of endless possibilities. Every day we can rummage through fragments looking for new meanings and unexpected messages.