Katarzyna Kozyra
Katarzyna Kozyra (born 1963) is a Polish video artist. She graduated in 1993 from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and received a Paszport Polityki award in 1997. She has exhibited internationally since 1997, at venues including Brown University and Carnegie International in the U.S.
Her art was involved in a 1999 censorship incident in Poland. Her photo portrait of Slawomir Belina in a Warsaw exhibition in 2000 was also controversial for its alleged eroticism, as his anus was in the centre of the composition.[1][2]
Since 2003 Kozyra has received a DAAD grant, and has developed a new form of performance involving operatic singing.[3]
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[edit] Controversy
Anda Rottenberg, Director of Galeria Zacheta in Warsaw where Kozyra first showed "Bath house" in 1997 and who also purchased the work, sparked off controversy by writing to Art Monthly in October 1998 and claiming that Kozyra's "Bath house" and artist Tacita Dean's 1998 "Gellert" were of the same subject: the most famous bath house in Budapest. Freely admitting that controversy helps in the promotion of a work, "Controversy around this work was in fact a very stimulating factor and now as the months passed Bath house has come to be regarded as classic", Rottenberg found the coincidence "indeed amazing". However, the works differ completely. Whereas Kozyra used hidden cameras intending to reveal the bathing women's natural behaviour as well as challenging normal considerations of privacy, and is a multi-screen video work (see letter again), Dean had permission from the bath workers and her single screen film is concerned with the healing sulphurous waters of the baths (see Colin Gleadell, The Daily Telegraph 1 February 2001).
[edit] Further reading
- Sabine Folie, The Impossible Theater: Performativity in the Works of Pawel Althamer, Tadeusz Kantor, Katarzyna Kozyra, Robert Kusmirowski and Artur Zmijewski, Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst (2006), ISBN 3938821035
- Brandon Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art since 1970, Prentice Hall (2004), ISBN 0131181742
- Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl (ed.), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, The MIT Press (2002), ISBN 0262083132 - described at MOMA International Program [1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Pawel Leszkowicz, Feminist Revolt: Censorship of Women’s Art in Poland, Bad Subjects website, Jan 2005
- ^ Karol Sienkiewicz, Penetration and Gender Insubordination: On the examples of Belina, Mapplethorpe, and Herrmann, SEKCJA magazine
- ^ Only in art, dreams come true, culture.pl website
[edit] External links
- Exhibition 2004-05, Carnegie International
- Exhibition in 2004, Postmasters, New York - see Archive reviewed at Paulina Pobocha, Katarzyna Kozyra’s Punishment and Crime, NY Arts magazine
- Exhibition in 2003, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University
- Biography, culture.pl website
- Kozyra's official website
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