KATARZINA KOZYRA
curated by Estelle af Malmborg and Timothy Persons
Kulturhuset
Sergels torg - Stockholm
dal 29/9/2012 al 6/1/2013
Katarzyna Kozyra (born in 1963 in Warsaw) is counted among the forerunners of Eastern European feminist and critical art and is one of Poland’s most acclaimed artists. With this exhibition a larger presentation of her work will be shown in Sweden for the first time.
Kozyra puts her finger on cultural taboos and stereotypes in artworks that often provoke strong feelings and touch on issues of identification and gender identity, on how we see ourselves and our bodies. Since the beginning of her carreer she has been dealing with every day social issues that she considered ambigous.
The exhibition encompasses installations, video, and photography from the mid-nineties to the present. The artworks included in the exhibition all deal in different ways with questions regarding roles and identity, one of the main threads leading through Kozyra’s work.
In 1999, when visiting Jerusalem, Kozyra learned about the Jerusalem syndrome, a temporary state characterized by sudden and intense religious delusions, brought on while visiting or living in the city. She went back over Easter this year to work on a project on it. The trailer presented for the first time in the exhibition is the starting point of her investigation.
With this project, Kozyra wants to investigate the shift between "pretending," "performing," "believing," and "being." The people suffering from this syndrome truly believe that they are the Messiah but they are considered mental ill by others.
A central piece in Kozyra’s body of work is the video installation Men’s Bathhouse that was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1999, receiving an honorable mention. Filmed with a hidden camera in the famous bath at the Gellert Hotel in Budapest, the multi-channel video work provokes questions around ethics and privacy, about gender stereotypes and our perception of male as opposed to female nudity. Disguised as a man the artist herself is featured in the work, a fact which was perceived as highly provocative and caused strong reactions.
The video installation Rite of Spring (1999-2001) reflects Kozyra’s interest in the limits of the body, as well as notions of beauty and physical perfection. It is based on Igor Stravinsky’s ballet by the same name that scandalized audiences in Paris when it was first presented there in 1913. Using Nijinsky’s groundbreaking original choreography as a point of departure Kozyra takes up the themes of aging and transformation that are broached in the ballet, where through a wild dance a young girl transposes her energy to the earth resulting in her death. Kozyra’s work features naked aging men and women whose bodies are marked by time. Unable to perform Nijinsky’s physically demanding choreography Kozyra’s dancers are filmed lying down against a pared-down background. The thousands of takes become jerky sequences that further emphasize the sense of vulnerability. A charged atmosphere is built up around the ballet’s theme of death as a source of new life in a multi-layered work that is ultimately about the human condition.
Although the body is a central theme in contemporary art, it is relatively rare that one sees work such as this dealing with the physical realities of illness and aging. In Kozyra’s early work Olympia (1996), the artist herself poses like the beautiful courtesan in Edouard Manet’s famous painting by the same name. Here, however, she is lying in a hospital bed, bald from the chemotherapy treatment for a cancer she diagnosed with in 1992. As in many of her works Kozyra forces us to confront our own mortality and shows that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
In Art Dreams Come True (2003-2009) consists of happenings, films and performances. Kozyra uses herself as raw material as she – with the help of the opera singer Pitulej and the famous drag queen Gloria Viagra from Berlin’s club scene – develops her singing ability and her femininity. She appears in a variety of roles, testing her own limits and allowing us to confront our prejudices and desires, and not least prevailing conceptions of ideal beauty and social behavior, male and female. When she performs as an opera diva and throws herself into the most difficult arias it is also about daring to live out one’s dream, about nothing being impossible.
The exhibition is produced by Kulturhuset in collaboration with the artist.
