BREAKING DOWN NEWS

„Breaking Down News” blurb by Magdalena Dubrowska, translation – Soren Gauger

Breaking news! This just in! In this collage of press reports, fragments of the most colorful news of 2019–20, broken down into their most elemental parts or shattered to bits like mirrors, various facts drift further and further from their original meanings and begin to free-float like old satellites and other space junk orbiting the Earth. The meaning and the picture both blur: the faces of the television presenters vanish and bits of the news strips are erased, utterly changing the context. Or in fact: depriving the viewer of all context.
We see reports of a dangerous pandemic and a perilous virus, but we are not entirely sure if it is COVID-19.
The speakers broadcast information about Brexit, but the screen shows shots of a demolished building with a “Mini Europa” logo. This is a chain of grocery shops which began operating in Warsaw in the 1990s as a symbol of the new sociopolitical system after the fall of communism, and now it was collapsing itself.
Creating these “fake news” programs, or rather, “fake images,” director Katarzyna Wińska produces Breaking Down News, which is a play on words, combining “breaking news” and the various uses of the idiom “breaking down.”
This is not just a nervous breakdown. It is also break down in terms of decay, and in terms of statistical data. And finally, it pertains to the chemical process whereby chemical compounds separate into more primary elements.
This is the process to which Wińska subjects the news: reduced, chopped into their basic components and over-aestheticized, to expose their own absurdity and be soundly mocked.