The Most Elementary Questions

Adam Mazur: How did you become an artist?
Karolina Breguła: It began when, as a rock fan, I went to photography school to learn how to make portraits of my idols. I wanted to photograph stars and take pictures for album covers. The school was in Sweden, and it was there that my dreams began to come true: at the age of nineteen or twenty, I went to concerts constantly and photographed young Stockholm bands. At school I took classes with the artist Leena Jokela, who fascinated me with her archives of mechanical photographs documenting the city. Her series of 98 gas boxes or 52 worn paths were something entirely extraordinary to me. I began going to exhibitions that Leena recommended to us, and in this way I discovered fairly quickly that the role of photography did not end with portraying musicians.
A. M.: Why did you decide to return to Poland?
K. B.: For a fairly prosaic reason. Poland was not yet in the European Union, and I needed a student visa to stay in Sweden. I lost track of things and forgot to apply for an extension in time. My pleas to the Migration Agency were no help: I had to leave and was not allowed to return to Sweden for at least a year. I decided not to waste time and found a school in Warsaw.
A. M.: You mentioned leaving the country, but why did you actually leave Poland?
K. B.: That is ancient history. As a teenager, I was a fan of Roxette. I loved the band so much that I learnt the language in order to understand the Swedish-language part of their work. Like every proper fan, I also travelled to Sweden from time to time. At first my father took me there, bravely putting up with my passion; later, when I was older, I went with fellow fans from Poland. They were wonderful trips, during which I met a great many phenomenal people with whom I remain in touch. One of them is Anna Tomaszewska, now deputy director of the Polish Institute in Stockholm and responsible for its artistic programme. Through those journeys and learning the language, Sweden became an important place for me. My former idols faded into oblivion, but my attachment to Sweden remained. By the time I left Poland, I was already a punk and ashamed of my musical past.
A. M.: When you returned to Poland, were you no longer one?
K. B.: Of course I was. I am still a punk.
A. M.: After returning, did you stop taking portraits of musicians and celebrities?
K. B.: No, I still did them. For example, I often photographed the then little-known Cool Kids of Death. In fact, one of the photographs from that period appeared in the booklet accompanying one of their recent albums. I also photographed Pustki—a recent reissue of their Domina includes one of my shots from that time as well. Later, together with Agnieszka Klembowska and Kuba Wrzosek, I founded the record label Kuka Records, and I took a great many photographs for our own purposes. I have plenty of musician friends. If one of them asks me to take some pictures and I have the time, I do it because it is fun. Photographs I made with Wojtek Rudzki recently appeared on an album by the Łódź band TRYP.
A. M.: What did you do after returning to Poland? I first met you as a photography student at a school in Warsaw, and only a moment later you were attracting attention because of the exhibition “Let Them See Us”. Was that your diploma project?
K. B.: No, my diploma project was still album covers. Let Them See Us came a little later. The project was an intuitive response to the situation of gay men and lesbians, which I had the opportunity to observe at close quarters. When I arrived in Warsaw, I had no job, money or flat. So I spent the first few months staying with friends of mine, a lovely gay couple. I watched the absurdity of their daily lives: pretending to be good friends in front of neighbours and parents, hiding their sexual orientation from even their closest colleagues so that the truth would not reach their bosses, because that might harm their position at work. I watched with astonishment, which quickly turned into anger. I decided that I had to respond. That was how Let Them See Us came about.

A. M.: Was “Let Them See Us” commissioned by the Campaign Against Homophobia?
K. B.: No. It irritates me a little that so many people think so. Let Them See Us was not a commission but my own series, which I conceived myself; before it reached the Campaign Against Homophobia, I struggled for a long time to find anyone willing to help me realise it. I went from one institution to another and got nowhere. Eventually, I told Krystian Legierski about my idea. He is an old school friend from Cieszyn. It was around the time when Krystian appeared on the legendary gay cover of Machina, so I decided he was bound to think of something. And indeed he suggested that I approach the Campaign Against Homophobia. I went to them with a short description and a single, preliminary photograph. I remember that they laughed at my idea. They thought it would not work. But not long afterwards they called and said that they wanted to try after all. So we began working together. At the time, besides the gallery exhibition, I wanted the project to consist of enormous posters showing life-size figures. They were to be pasted up just above ground level, so that people could confront the couples I had photographed almost face to face. The street was supposed to notice what it did not normally see. To this day, I think it was a wonderful idea, and I regret that it could not be realised in that form. Instead, the photographs were displayed on dreadful billboards high above the ground.
A. M.: When the scandal erupted, how did you see what was happening?
K. B.: I was astonished. I knew that things were bad when it came to tolerance, but I had no idea they were quite so bad. At the same time, I was pleased because I could see that my project was producing real change, that it was beginning a new discussion. It made me realise that I had an extraordinary tool in my hands, one with which a great deal could be achieved.
A. M.: The protests were not confined to tearing down posters, closing exhibitions and censorship: the couples you had photographed also began withdrawing from the project. How did you respond to that?
K. B.: I did not want the series to hurt anyone. I knew that deciding to participate in the project was a fairly heroic step for each of its protagonists. So from the outset I agreed with most of them that I would show their photographs only for as long as they wished. They knew that they could withdraw their pictures from the project whenever they wanted. That is precisely why I now show only a few works. Only six photographs were shown in the Homo Ars Erotica exhibition at the National Museum.
A. M.: You had acquired knowledge about photography, which proved to be a tool that worked. What did you do next?
K. B.: Over the next few years, most of my artistic activities responded to shortcomings I had observed in the world. I made socially engaged projects, always trying, as in Let Them See Us, to make unfamiliar things familiar and to address important matters in a light and engaging way. This is probably best described by the playful project Art Emergency Service, in which I declare that, as an artist, I want to do something good for people. If I cannot do so through art, I shall decide to use my tools in a non-artistic way. The project was created in Kielce, where it is fucking freezing—as the saying known to almost every Pole has it. I installed old film lights, which heat up like stoves, at Kielce railway station. In this way I created a warm square where people could warm themselves. All of this took place on 13 December, on the freezing feast day of Saint Lucy, patron saint of light. Besides projects of this kind, I also made more personal works, such as the Warsaw series, about otherness and not fitting in, and Married Women, a project about friendship that I made with Ola Buczkowska.
A. M.: Some critics regarded it as your coming out and assumed that you were a couple.
K. B.: That is true. But it did not particularly bother us; in a sense we are a couple, and even something more than a couple. The project concerned an extraordinarily intense relationship, stronger and more important than our relationships with men because it was founded on mutual understanding and empathy—a relationship possible only between people of the same sex. It was a series about friendship, about a kind of universal emotion shared by all women.

A. M.: It took the form of an exhibition in a commercial Warsaw gallery. Had you become an artist in the meantime?
K. B.: I think I had been an artist much earlier. But it is true that when I showed Married Women in 2006, three years had passed since Let Them See Us, and I understood a little better how this complicated world operated. I was probably creating more consciously as well. By then I was studying at the Film School in Łódź and, strongly influenced by Józef Robakowski, beginning to move beyond photography as a medium. Married Women is a series of photographs and a video lasting several minutes.

A. M.: Was anyone else important to you?
K. B.: At the Film School? During the first year, we had several interesting meetings with Wojtek Wieteska. I loved the documentary film screenings led by Professor Wanda Mirowska. Yet it was Robakowski who, in the view of many of us, taught the most interesting classes. They did not change in the slightest throughout our years at the School: we always watched different works selected according to the professor's personal map of tastes and friendships. It was enjoyable, because one went to those classes to “spend time with the master” and listen to anecdotes—more to be inspired than to learn. Although, of course, we also learnt along the way. I learnt that it is important to know what one has to say. Robakowski believed that once you knew, you simply had to say it. He takes a programmatically anarchic approach to form, so he never pressured us to master the craft. I think he was more interested in our authenticity and naivety than in virtuosity with the tools. Today I do not quite agree with that, and I somewhat regret that this way of thinking means there are still certain things I cannot do, that I did not leave the Film School with a solid grounding in the craft.
A. M.: Did you complete your diploma under Robakowski?
K. B.: Yes. I completed both my bachelor's and master's dissertations under Józef Robakowski. I am now preparing for a doctorate, though I have a feeling the professor has had enough of me. This time my supervisor will be Neil Cummings from Chelsea College of Art and Design.
A. M.: What were those diploma projects?
K. B.: The bachelor's project was a series of interviews, transcribed and presented as a book. The theoretical dissertation was almost identical to the practical work, which is fairly unusual at art schools. The theoretical work was a book describing the other, “practical” book. For my master's degree I presented the Art Translation Agency.
A. M.: So those would be your first meta-artistic works, in which you addressed the definition of art and the workings of the art field?
K. B.: Earlier, I had made Video Camera, which reflected on the film-making tool in the artist's hands. Later there was also Useful Art: repetitions of conceptual gestures made in such a way that they became useful in the everyday sense. Even then, I was considering how a textbook work of art functions in our consciousness. After Let Them See Us, I thought a great deal about art's effects. I could see that what I had done was influencing reality. I came to believe that I could change things through my work, and I liked that very much. I made further socially engaged works, such as the series of actions Good Neighbours and the installation Telescope. At the same time, I began observing critical-art practitioners and had the impression that critical actions in galleries failed completely, because they did not reach the right audiences. If the true intention is to influence society, such works should be presented where society actually spends time. Those were my thoughts at the time. Several small actions and two larger student works grew from them.

A. M.: Yet you analysed not so much yourself or the art world as the audience.
K. B.: Yes, my first analyses focused on non-professional audiences. 66 Conversations about Contemporary Art is a series of interviews with people who do not normally visit galleries. I investigated what art meant to them and asked them to analyse several selected works. I would formulate many of those questions differently today. But I still find some of the answers interesting. The work changed me profoundly. I realised that the key role in the relationship that interested me—between work and viewer—was played by the gallery, the institution. And I began examining it.
A. M.: Could it be that this work on understanding art's rules produced results different from those you intended? It seems to me that the activist and explicitly political element in your art began gradually to disappear, making way for other concerns.
K. B.: The purpose of my work was to find out what viewers thought. But I never declared that, once I knew, I would devote myself to artistic social engineering. Though in a sense that is precisely what I did: one might say that I began creating anti-institutions capable of serving as tools to weaken society's aversion to art. I think people find it easier to make themselves familiar with art thanks to me. Yet that is only a side effect of my activity. Its principal subject is myself: my failure to understand art, my confusion amid its meanings, contexts and possibilities. You are right that my interests moved into new areas. I became interested in art—in the entire machine that it is—and in my own position within that machine. I became interested in…
A. M.: …being an artist?
K. B.: Exactly. And in explaining what art is and what we need it for. What an art institution is and whether it is needed. And how a work functions within an institutional context.
A. M.: Was that the purpose of your counter-institutions, such as the “Art Translation Agency”?
K. B.:The Art Translation Agency was intended to disrupt the workings of this enormous machine, to contradict institutional truths and institutional language. It was a kind of challenge I issued to this great beast that I do not understand.
A. M.: Still? You seem to know more about art's institutional rules than the overwhelming majority of artists. That is because of your own research, but also because of your work with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, where you served as a guide for organised groups of foreign curators, critics and collectors ranging across the Polish art scene in search of new experiences. More than once, I thought that accompanying these experts during conversations about art and institutional programmes might, for an artist, closely resemble a child spying on their parents in the bedroom.
K. B.: It is true that my work at the Institute allows me to observe certain selected mechanisms. Those observations are the source of my constant bitterness. They cause all sorts of unpleasant thoughts to accumulate…
A. M.: Thoughts that appear in the film “Fire-Followers”?
K. B.: Both in Fire-Followers and in the Art Translation Agency, which was not merely a game with art, but also an attempt to overturn a certain status quo.
A. M.: You mentioned bitterness. As an artist, are you embittered by your situation?
K. B.: I am. But it is a good kind of bitterness, because it drives my activity. I feed on my bitterness.
A. M.: The two seldom go together, because there are probably many frustrated artists, but few can transform bitterness into a work. On the other hand, you do not seem to use your knowledge of art's rules to influence your institutional position.
K. B.: I do use it a little, but I am ashamed of myself when I do, because I find all of this deeply repellent.
A. M.: Why, then, do you not undertake critical or exposé-like actions towards this world of art institutions?
K. B.: It is not at all simple. If I want to criticise the existing situation, I ought to have an alternative proposal. And I do not. I do not even know whether I want one, because the institution and its entire context fascinate and attract me in their present form. I think I am addicted to all of it—to not understanding and feeling lost, to aversion and anger, to the sense that the existence of certain institutions or activities is pointless.
A. M.: We have discussed critical art. Do you regard yourself as a critical artist?
K. B.: Yes. I am a critical artist in a subtle way. I believe such criticism can be more effective than action full of unequivocal outrage. Perhaps I borrowed that thought from Józef Robakowski, who conveys his messages, whatever they may be, lightly and always clothed in a smile. I believe art works best in this way. If we use it as a tool for social change, the change will be much more effective if introduced in small steps.
A. M.: Neil Cummings is to be your supervisor. Why?
K. B.: I am interested in his position and in the subjects he addresses. I wanted my supervisor to be someone involved in institutional critique—someone with whom I could discuss it.
A. M.: Can your work be described as institutional critique?
K. B.: Institutional critique is such a broad and diverse tendency that I think some of my work belongs within it. The Art Translation Agency would certainly be one example, and another would be Useful Art, a series of gestures in which I repeated works important to conceptual art in such a way as to make them as useful as possible. For instance, I repeated Richard Long's A Line Made by Walking by doing a fitness workout with a group of girls in a park, so that the result was a copy of Long's work. This piece grew from thoughts about art collections—especially ephemeral art, which was never meant to have a physical form or gather dust in museum storage. Other works connected with archives were the action Reconstruction of the Galeria Wschodnia Archive, for which I invited former visitors to the gallery to help me put its historical documents in order by hand, and the installation series Corrective Photographs, through which I proposed a new perspective on Zofia Chomętowska's archives, then being catalogued by the Archaeology of Photography Foundation. Several months ago, at the Künstlerhaus in Dortmund, I made a work entitled Kippenberger Cookies. It was an installation consisting of genuine, delicious shortbread biscuits whose colour, shape and pattern referred to a work by Martin Kippenberger that had recently been accidentally destroyed by a cleaner at a Dortmund museum. I placed the biscuits in the gallery among the other works in such a way that it was not entirely clear whether they were refreshments for visitors or an artist's work. I wanted people to have to decide how to behave towards them. I think several works that I shall make in the near future will be almost textbook examples of institutional critique. I shall soon begin a work in the form of a television series whose subject will be the usefulness of works in museums. 

A. M.: Is medium completely irrelevant to you now?

K. B.: Completely irrelevant. I find it amusing when somebody calls me a “photographer” or “video artist”. After all, I do many other things as well. I have made a performance—although I do not know whether that was permitted of me as a video artist. And I made an online project—although I do not know whether, as a performance artist, I thereby caused problems for the critics. Now I am organising an academic conference: what am I as its creator? Decades have passed since Allan Kaprow emphasised the absurdity of using such defining terms as “painter” or “photographer”, yet we still have a problem with them. It is strange, because on the other hand artists evidently do not care much about it and feel no responsibility towards the artistic disciplines in which they were trained.

A. M.: Where, then, do you find ideas for your work?
K. B.: In confusion, in the thousands of questions that multiply in my head. And in doubt and rebellion against what, deep down, I adore above all else. My favourite memory is of museums where visitors had to put on felt slippers. I don't think there are any such museums left in Poland. I should like to make a film about one that still operates, if such a place exists anywhere in the world. Museum slippers are extraordinarily symbolic, because they are at once warm and homely, yet uncomfortable and difficult to move in.
A. M.: Can you identify a moment when you became aware of this confusion?
K. B.: It probably began while I was working on 66 Conversations. While interviewing ordinary art viewers, I repeatedly agreed with what they said about works by contemporary artists. Like them, I often fail to understand something; I often become angry as well and think that something is worthless. Artists, curators and critics rather rarely admit that. It is a pity. I decided that I would.
A. M.: Are there artists with whom you discuss it?
K. B.: Not really. I remember that after I made the Art Translation Agency, some artists were angry with me; they thought what I was doing was harmful. I discussed the subject at length. A few weeks ago, I took part in the Giant Step workshop organised by the curators Magda Ujma and Anna Smolak with Galeria Labirynt in Lublin. It was an international meeting intended to develop a kind of shared institutional reflection. Curators, cultural practitioners and artists participated.
A. M.: Józef Robakowski, too, has made a number of works with a similar critical charge, such as “The Artist as Stag”.
K. B.: Robakowski and I certainly also share an ambivalent attitude towards art institutions.
A. M.: Is your latest film, which will première at Atlas Sztuki in January 2013, also a critique of art institutions?
K. B.: The film is a futuristic parable about the rejection of art. Speaking very generally, I think it could be placed within the field of institutional critique.
A. M.: What exactly is the film about?
K. B.: The film is a walk through an extraordinary city whose inhabitants have decided to reject art. They have resolved to close the museums and galleries and throw the works they kept at home into the rubbish. They believe this will keep them safe. There is no traditional narrative; viewers are responsible for the story themselves. Because the film is a loop, it has no beginning or end, so much depends on the moment at which we enter the screening room. The whole is a riddle that may have many solutions. We grope our way through a world full of inconsistencies, in which everything rests on supposition and guesswork. It is a film before which we are meant to be helpless. I chose this form to speak about confusion that leads to an absurd fear: fear of the power art may have over us; fear of an artistic establishment that may be preparing an epochal conspiracy…

A. M.: How do you understand the title “Fire-Followers”?
K. B.: I hope I have managed to create a film with two parallel and equally interesting meanings. One is a reflection on the art system and the condition of art; the other consists of short stories about extraordinary, compelling people. The title comes from one of those stories. In the film, we meet a biologist who talks about plants grown in a laboratory. They belong to the group known as fire-followers, a kind of grass that grows naturally in places affected by fire, on burnt ground. Naturally, I also want the phrase to evoke the destruction proposed by the Futurists—a destruction after which something new is meant to develop. There is one more connection: in one of the film's scenes, we are in a municipal aquarium. A guide tells us about the fish that live there when we suddenly see that works of art, enclosed in special transparent waterproof cases, have been placed inside the tanks. The guide speaks to us about the Constructivist revolution, whose fire was brutally extinguished. The title's fire-followers thus repeatedly signify destruction after which something is reborn.
A. M.: Is this your diagnosis of contemporary art and your response to the situation in which you, too, have found yourself as an artist?
K. B.: No, it is not a diagnosis. It is an intellectual exercise, a game of creating futuristic scenarios. Although, while making the film, it was indeed difficult to resist offering similar superficial diagnoses. Norway, where most of the footage was shot, is a country where people live in safety, comfort and prosperity—even now, amid a raging financial crisis. The generation that remembers the last serious conflict has almost died out, and even those who remember the people who remembered are slowly disappearing. I wondered how profoundly this affected the art of young artists. Polish art is similar, for that matter. Nobody has been shot in our streets for years; meat and sugar have not been rationed for a long time. We may not be wealthy and may struggle to make ends meet, but we do not experience real fear or real injustice. As a result, our art differs from that of our parents or grandparents.
A. M.: Does some historic catastrophe have to occur before artists can create works?
K. B.: I do not know. But in my fictional story, art is a monster that feeds on tragedy. I show it as a self-perpetuating mechanism. When it loses its source of suffering, it causes an imaginary catastrophe in order to frighten itself and create fuel for further work. 

A. M.: In the film, you use the form of a documentary—or perhaps rather a mockumentary.
K. B.: Yes, the film is staged—planned by me, with dialogue that I wrote—but it was made using documentary methods. I reveal those methods in many places. As we watch the film, it not only seems that we are drawing ever closer to solving the city's riddle; we also see the artificiality and lack of authenticity with increasing clarity. We notice imperfections in the staging, passages that would certainly have been cut during the editing of a documentary film; finally, in one scene, we hear me prompt one of the film's most credible protagonists from behind the camera. Amusingly, he does not repeat the line after me, so we remain uncertain whether or not the film is a documentary. This extraordinarily credible protagonist provides a hidden link to another project I am currently realising: an academic conference connected with the spatial forms in Elbląg. As a young man, he participated in one of the Biennales of Spatial Forms in Elbląg. On his wall he has a photograph in which we see him working with Marian Bogusz.
A. M.: Besides the film, the exhibition will include a presentation of documentation from the academic conference. Could you tell us about it now?

K. B.: The conference is an undertaking developed in collaboration with Galeria EL in Elbląg. The Gallery's curator invited me to contribute to her year-long project Awakening, whose central theme is the end of the world. Because I have long been fascinated by Elbląg's spatial forms, I decided to focus on them. The spatial forms were created through the Biennales of Spatial Forms, a well-known open-air sculpture event held in Elbląg in the 1960s and 1970s. The Biennale responded to a kind of ending: the city's complete destruction during the war. I decided to invite scholars from different disciplines to investigate whether, from the perspective of their fields, any relationship exists between the spatial forms and the end of the world. I invited mathematicians, physicists, biologists, psychologists and philosophers. All are now conducting research, whose results they will present during the conference in Elbląg on 14 and 15 December and in a publication to be issued later this year by Bęc Zmiana.

A. M.: The film seems to have been an enormous logistical undertaking. Had you previously had comparable experience of teamwork?
K. B.: Running the Art Translation Agency taught me how to collaborate with a vast, essentially unlimited, number of people. It was also training in working systematically and conscientiously. For more than a year, the Agency occupied several hours of every day, and it certainly prepared me for working on the film, which really was a gigantic challenge. When I began, I did not know that more than a year of not sleeping or eating lay ahead. Of course, the film is not my work alone. It was made in collaboration with the producer Ola Wojtaszek and a team whose members joined the two of us at different stages of production. We worked with the cinematographer Robert Mleczko, sound recordist and editor Weronika Raźna, sound recordist Ola Pniak, production designer Patrycja Rabińska, editor Stefan Paruch and Nicolas Bredin, who was responsible for sound post-production. We also had two assistants, Ada and Bartek, who helped a little from time to time. That is quite a large number of people for a modest artistic undertaking. I had indeed never worked with a team like that before. I know I did not always succeed in giving everyone creative freedom. To tell the truth, I was probably difficult to work with at times.

A. M.: Many visual artists have been making films recently. How would you place “Fire-Followers” within the wider context of this turn towards film production?
K. B.: Like all other films of this kind, Fire-Followers fulfils a need to make a more extensive statement. Film is exceptionally well suited to this. I am constantly asked what distinguishes a film made by an artist from one made by a professional filmmaker. Everything and nothing. An artist is a filmmaker who has not mastered the tools of film. Their films may be unbearable or they may delight us, because they employ a wholly different poetics, a wholly different mode of narration and a different relationship to storytelling altogether. But, on the other hand, look at David Lynch's Inland Empire, for example, and tell me whether that is a film by a typical filmmaker. That is why I think every film-making endeavour should be considered separately, regardless of who is behind it.

A. M.: I understand. In that case, the question is: why did you make this film?
K. B.: I wanted to tell a story that would be the sum of all my reflections, searches and paranoia. It is a little like telling people our dreams: we like recounting them, but we do not like it when others recount theirs. I wanted people to be willing to hear my story about nightmares. Film seems the most accessible form, so I used it.
A. M.: You mentioned Lynch. Were you inspired by him? Is “Fire-Followers” an “Inland Empire” about the art world?

K. B.: No, I am not inspired by Lynch. His films frighten me; I usually turn them off halfway through. 

A. M.: Where, then, did you seek inspiration? Perhaps the language and landscape make the whole thing seem connected with Scandinavian existential cinema.
K. B.: There must indeed have been something Scandinavian in the film from the screenplay stage. I remember that, during our first conversation, Robert, the film's cinematographer, said that he saw a Scandinavian disquiet in the screenplay. He mentioned Roy Andersson, whom I do in fact like very much, even if I sometimes find him a little pretentious. I love Bergman and Antonioni. One of my favourite artist-photographers is Mitra Tabrizian, whose work, incidentally, also contains a great deal of Antonioni. Those are the names of several creators I respect; a complete list would be very long. My greatest inspiration is the chaos of artists and their works that I carry in my head.

A. M.: What sort of reception do you expect?
K. B.: I expect some people to leave the cinema bored, complaining that the film is too long and incomprehensible, while others will accept the challenge of helping to create its meanings. I hope there will not be many of the first group, because film has the appealing quality of being serious while nevertheless remaining entertainment.

*

It is growing dark. A glaring, pulsating light becomes increasingly visible through a crack in the wall of the gallery corridor where we are conducting our conversation.

K. B.: What is that strange light?
A. M.: It is a signal. The centre is behind the wall.
K. B.: The centre of what?
A. M.: At present, it is the centre of everything, although that will probably change before long.
K. B.: That is good, because it looks a little dangerous. Wait, I shall try to soften it.

(Karolina Breguła walks over to the crack and covers the lamp with a small mirror from her make-up bag, encrusted with a multitude of glittering crystals. Instead of the harsh light, we now see hundreds of its softened and distorted reflections on the walls and ceiling. The whole scene resembles the spots of reflected light we made as children, or a tacky disco ball).

A. M.: All right, it is late and we must end our conversation. Just tell me one more thing: what is the exhibition called?
K. B.: I still do not know. Perhaps you would like to suggest something?