She's Touching Her Forehead, She Can Feel It Burning, She Probably Has a Fever

From 20 June to 20 September 2026 the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art showed a solo exhibition by Karolina Breguła in Gallery 1, next to the Collection Study Magazine, built around her five-channel video installation The Storm (2020).

The Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art on the exhibition:

Catastrophe does not arrive suddenly; it approaches slowly, gradually permeating the fabric of everyday life. Karolina Breguła dissects our behaviours under pressure and in the face of threat. In an age of cognitive warfare, amid overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises - climatic, political and humanitarian - the exhibition becomes a suggestive portrait of a society gripped by fear and division.

The central work in the exhibition is a five-voice narrative about a devastating storm sweeping across a sea-bound island. The protagonists observe it from a distant shore - initially with curiosity and amazement at the force of the thunder and lightning, and later with mounting unease in the face of nature’s destructive power. Confronted with danger, the community begins to reveal its fragility. People are disoriented; at times they seem to join forces in temporary alliances, only to turn away from one another, succumb to the influence of others or attempt to secure their individual needs. Cynicism emerges towards the misfortunes befalling neighbours on a nearby island. Growing fear exposes the mechanisms of social indifference, populism and conformism, which gradually undermine social trust and lead to isolation, intensifying the sense of threat. The community, of which the viewer involuntarily becomes a part, falls apart. The only thing that holds it together is the landscape.

As in the artist’s other films, the landscape here is not only a narrative frame, but also an active substance that retains the memory of numerous human and non-human beings. Traces of their histories are inscribed in the ruins of houses and in the objects abandoned during flight; their subjectivity is dissolved into atmospheric phenomena and elements of the natural world. As in The Storm, the landscape becomes a space for reflecting on socio-political instability.

The exhibition also introduces a Taiwanese motif, strongly present in the artist’s practice, as Breguła has produced most of her works over the past decade in Taiwan. A photograph from the Low Tide series depicts the town of Xincuo inundated by the sea. The gradual subsidence of the land, combined with rising sea levels, means that the local landscape is in a state of continuous transformation. Here, catastrophe is clearly extended over time, and the anticipation of its subsequent stages has become a calm, accepted part of the residents’ everyday life.

Karolina Breguła’s works are a sombre collective portrait of a society seized by fear and division. “I’m touching my forehead, I can feel it burning, I probably have a fever,” says one of the protagonists of The Storm, and her words sound like a diagnosis of the inflammatory state in which communities find themselves in the face of crises and permanent tension.

What to expect

The title is a quotation from the work itself: the sentence is spoken by one of the protagonists of The Storm, the five-voice filmed narrative at the centre of the show. The museum reads it as a diagnosis of the inflammatory state of communities living under permanent tension.

Alongside the film comes a Taiwanese thread - a photograph from the Low Tide series showing the town of Xincuo inundated by the sea, a place where land subsidence and rising sea levels have turned catastrophe into calmly accepted everyday life.

The exhibition was part of a series of solo presentations in Gallery 1, devoted to artists whose works are held in the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art collection. It was curated by Anna Czaban. The description, credits and events programme remain on the exhibition’s page on the museum’s website.

Context

Karolina Breguła, born in 1979 in Katowice, studied photography at the Łódź Film School, where she also earned her doctorate; according to Polish Wikipedia (in Polish), film has been her main medium since 2013. Her Fire-Followers was shown in 2013 at the 55th Venice Biennale as part of Romania’s presentation, and Office for Monument Construction won the Golden Claw at the Gdynia Film Festival in 2016. Culture.pl calls her film Square, shot in Tainan, a universal parable about the fear of revealing troublesome secrets; the museum says she lives in Szczecin, a port city in north-western Poland, teaches at its Academy of Art, and for the past ten years has made most of her work in Tainan.

After the show

The museum has not announced another venue for the exhibition, and its exhibition page lists no catalogue. During the three-month run the museum held two tours led by Karolina Breguła herself (30 July and 9 August) and, on the closing weekend of 19-20 September, a writing workshop, „Pisanie na czas kryzysu vol. 3” (Writing for a Time of Crisis, vol. 3), with the artist and Dorota Ogrodzka.

No press reviews could be found, and the museum has published no visitor figures or awards. The show is, however, recorded on Culture.pl (in Polish), whose profile of the artist describes it as a study of human behaviour under pressure and threat.

On now at Ujazdowski Castle:

• All of Us or None - the first solo show in Poland by the British artist Imran Perretta: film, sound and poetry about power, surveillance and exclusion, the same mechanisms of fear that Breguła traced in the community of The Storm; until 4 October 2026.
• Neither Water Nor Land - a group show about peat bogs, where the landscape, as in Breguła’s work, keeps memory and traces of violence; until 27 September 2026, so time is short.

Related exhibitions on now elsewhere in Warsaw:

• Everything Will Change - an open-air show by the State Ethnographic Museum about the polycrisis and the long-term cost of extracting natural resources, in glass pavilions on the Vistula boulevards; free admission, until 27 October 2026.
• Adam Kozicki. War of Everyone Against Everyone - paintings about the internet as a space of culture wars and emotional tension, close to Breguła’s diagnosis of a divided society; at the Museum of Modern Art until 10 January 2027.

Museum profile: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art.