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found footage video

Burska dismantles the narrative order of the plot to show the infinite potential of human fate – an unsettling potential because of its being free from any rules, being unpredictable. Simultaneously, the artist reveals that the plot – Aristotelian “arrangement of the incidents” – operates like a defence mechanism which casts the cause-effect mesh onto “open” fate, squeezing the latter into a three-act scheme of scenarios with defined turning points and climaxes. In this way, Burska’s film becomes like a report from a specifically contemporary experience, described by Slavoj Žižek: a new “life experience is in the air, a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear centred narrative and renders life as a multiform flow – even and up to the domain of hard sciences (…) This perception of our reality as one of the possible – often even not the most probable – outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our true reality as spectra of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema”.

Which form will become the proper expression for such an experience? – Žižek continues to ask. Although the author himself proposes a hypertext, it seems that found footage can be one such form; using Žižek’s words, the fragile, montage-based and linear plot in Burska’s films is constantly “haunted (…) by the spectre of what might have happened” – every subsequent fragment, composing the plot of Shooting Star or A Piece of Jade, makes references to another plot, an alternative, parallel fate which we, as viewers, remember from the films used by the artist. Therefore, the form of Burska’s films is both linear and open.

excerpt from the text Critical Déjà Vu – On Bogna Burska’s Films by Kuba Mikurda, catalogue Films. Bogna Burska, ed. Aleksandra Grzonkowska, published by Wyspa Art Institute, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, BWA Zielona Góra, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, 2014