Shooting Time takes as its point of departure Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), one of the most radical actions in the history of performance art. It is not a reconstruction of Burden’s work, however, but an attempt to analytically disassemble its gesture into its fundamental components: the body, pressure, time, sound, and language.
The performance takes the form of a kind of “formal analysis.” What, in Burden’s work, was condensed into a brief, liminal act of gunfire is stretched out in time and subjected to transformation. The first element is bodily pressure–the impact and physical force exerted upon the surface of the body. The second is air pressure: the compressed air of the gunshot is translated into breath and sound. Through the use of circular breathing, the instantaneous moment of the shot is extended, transforming a singular impulse into a sustained process.
The third element is language and the question of the performative frame. The work reflects on the ways in which a particular situation is extracted from the continuum of reality and constituted as an artistic event. Where does a performance begin and end? What determines whether a particular gesture is recognized as an artistic act? The frame of the event thus becomes one of its primary materials.
Burden’s work, created during the Vietnam War, remains an important political context. Shooting Time by Marek Rogulski does not, however, reconstruct the historical gesture of protest. Instead, it shifts attention towards its underlying structure–the relationship between violence, the body, impulse, time, and its representation.
Friday, 6.11.2026
4:30–5:00 p.m.
📍 Laboratory Theatre Space of the Grotowski Institute, Żelaznicze Passage, Market Square-Town Hall 27, 50-101 Wrocław
➔ Register here
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