Katarzyna Kozyra: an artist who doesn’t bow and scrape
Hundreds of kilometres paving the way to distinct political, societal and cultural backgrounds, as well as thirty years of life experience, differentiate my reality from that of Katarzyna Kozyra. Yet, her work not only speaks to me, but also strikes a strong personal chord.
When I met her in November 2023, I was keen to understand how Katarzyna Kozyra didn’t break, as a person or as an artist, after the vicious attacks that she has faced since the very beginning of her career; in particular a media frenzy that castigated her death-themed graduation piece, Pyramid of Animals (1993), a life-size sculpture consisting of four taxidermy animals arranged on top of one another, a video documenting the process of putting down and skinning a horse and a written commentary by the artist.
The mass media is inherently a poor friend to artists who take risks to create innovative, unpleasant or critical artworks. By structure, media outlets exist to shape minds, tame people into conformism, and discredit those who challenge norms to promote some sort of status quo. They are tools that enjoin: ‘Know your place, and stay there, nice and polite’. It’s no surprise that they went after Katarzyna Kozyra more than once.
Throughout her career, Kozyra never stayed in the place assigned to her by society. She continually created singular artworks through which she expressed alternative viewpoints, even if they implied disturbance to the zealots of the mass-mediated norm. ‘I couldn’t do it differently’, she told me, when explaining the resilience of her art practice.
Kozyra’s body of work is, indeed, steeped in autobiographical affirmation. One specificity of her autobiographical work is that, although it is never sentimental, it is deeply personal. Sleep (2023), a performance through which she slept during her birthday party following a lifeless phase of depression is the latest illustration of the personal charge that flourishes in her work, and that has been present since the very premise of her journey as an artist, either through collaboration with friends (Crucian Carps [1992]), or the evocation of biographical elements (illness [Olympia, 1996]) and opinions (The Midget Gallery [2006–2008]).
Kozyra’s work is relevant not only because it centres on an authentic narrative about what it is like to be the artist Katarzyna Kozyra, but also what it is like to be a woman in a male-dominated society. As Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates in La Domination masculine (1998), masculine domination persists in our societies as it is psychically and corporeally internalised by the dominant (men) and the dominated (women) alike. Women Bathhouse (1997), a video installation that echoes the Western tradition of ‘turqueries’ and ‘orientalist’ painting, captures non-canonical women’s bodies and spontaneous patterns of behaviour that deeply contrast with the fantasied, idealistic vision of women’s intimacy that emanates from François Boucher’s rococo Venuses and Ingres’ classical, voluptuous odalisques and bathers. This piece is even more interesting when put into perspective next to Men’s Bathhouse (1999), a congruent video installation that portrays men in a public bath that Kozyra similarly infiltrated with a hidden camera. Comparing both these works, Bourdieu’s thought about internalised domination dynamics materialise visually: men invest the bath space with slow, wide moves that seem comfortable to them, eye scanning the environment in a very outward way, manifesting confident conduct; contrastingly, the women’s moves reflect an inward dynamic, focusing on their own bodies, not on what’s going on around them, and moving in a very gracious, self-conscious manner that suggests that they have interiorised a soft femininity that they cannot eliminate, even when they are separated from men.
These domination dynamics, described by Bourdieu and made visible in Kozyra’s work, affect the identity of both the dominant and the dominated groups, but in a very specific way for women. In 1996, French sociologist Nathalie Heinich published États de femme, a study of women’s identity based on Western literary fiction. Heinich analyses the tension that revolves around women’s identity in its most basic foundations, such as the attribution of a last name. Women, indeed, construct their identity knowing that their last name is always that of a man before it’s theirs — that of the father or the husband; and that it may be provisional — maiden name, spouse name, any one of them in case of divorce, perhaps another spouse’s name in case of remarriage… This tension around the last name is specifically a women’s experience. It implies that women are compelled to question the fundamental element of their name, and, consequently, reassess their identity multiple times throughout their lives. That being said, Heinich explains that women’s identity, as any dominated identity, is mainly an endogenous construction; women assert their identities by manifesting or rejecting the various ways (which Heinich calls ‘states’) of being a woman within contemporary society: a child-like woman, a lost woman, a free woman, an easy woman, an evil woman, etc…
These endogenous and precarious characteristics are reflected in Kozyra’s autobiographical body of work, which appears as a perpetual quest to examine and understand women’s identity with its individual constraints and tensions. In many of her pieces, Kozyra, indeed, explores the different states of being a woman that exist in our collective imagination. From an iconic femme-fatale in Lou Salome (2005), to an opera diva, a mysterious courtesan, a dynamic cheerleader, or a ‘Snow White in Wonderland’ type of character in the In Art Dreams Come True (2003–2006) series and Summertale (2008), Kozyra takes on roles that may, or may not, constitute parts of her own identity as a woman. Navigating between these different states actually results in making Kozyra’s identity multifaceted and, therefore, unreducible to a stereotype. The only aspect that is stated and continually affirmed each time she creates new artwork, is her identity as an artist. That’s why, in Casting (2010–2012), in which Kozyra searches for the right person to play her role in an autobiographical feature film, most interviews revolve around fundamental questions that surround artistic activity and an artist’s identity.
Kozyra is, hence, an artist who uses archetypes and stereotypes attached to identity construction as art materials. Many of her works not only blur the lines between the different states of being a woman, but also deconstruct simplistic identity markers that command in society, especially in relation to gender identity. This creative act of deconstruction is materialised in pieces such as Punishment and Crimes (2002) in which violent scenes of military operations are carried out by armed men wearing pin-up girls’ masks, making them look more absurd than aggressive, The Rite of Spring (1999–2000–2002) in which Kozyra switches roles with men taking those initially attributed to women in Stravinsky’s play, and Dance Lesson (2001) with them wearing women’s genitalia, and vice versa. These works bring fluidity, ambiguity and multiplicity inherent to identity by challenging the rigidness of the mental pictures we grow up with and share, collectively.
In Looking for Jesus (2012–2022), a video project and documentary film portraying dozens of people suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome (meaning that each one of them thinks they are the Messiah), the importance of ‘otherness’ in identity construction is manifested because it focuses on ‘Others’ rather than her ‘Self”. Many of Kozyra’s works involve people — In Art Dreams Come True (2003–2006) being the most ambitious one in terms of people involvement — but these people tend to guide Kozyra in the exploration of the different identity states that she embraces. With Looking for Jesus (2012–2022), she is the one who acts as a catalyst for the project participants to express themselves and crack the identity category to which they may easily be reduced to. The ‘ill person’ label, indeed, starts to dissipate as we discover the unique life journeys and diverging personality traits behind each person. They are not only ‘ill’ anymore; they may also be bad-tempered or sensitive, they may come from our hometown, and some may even seem ‘normal’. They may start to look a little bit more like ‘Us’– sane people.
Identity develops in the consciousness of otherness. ‘Others’ are those who are not the same as ‘Us’, marked by sameness, perhaps even those we don’t want to be like. Thinking of the world in terms of sameness and otherness implies a power dynamic; being qualified as the ‘Others’ is reserved for those who do not comply with the norm and whose identity is somehow devalued. The ‘Others’ are the ill ones in a social context that values health and performance. They are the women in a male-dominant society in which the masculine gender embodies the universal. They are the non-Westerners in a US-centred world.
For three decades, the identities of ‘Others’ with their devalued characteristics have become recurrent figures in Kozyra’s work: women, castrated men, midgets, non-canonical bodies, alternative ways of life and irrational minds. By affirming their existence and deconstructing the stereotypes from which they suffer, the identities of ‘Others’ are pulled out from the invisibility they are usually assigned to. This intent to compliment otherness is not only part of Kozyra’s art practice, but also a motive in her personal journey as a female Polish artist.
In 2012, she created the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, an organisation that aims to strengthen the representation of female artists from Central and Eastern Europe in the global art world. One of the projects carried out by the Foundation — The Secondary Archives — an online research and database platform that presents the history of non-Western, European art from a female perspective, contributes to disrupting dominant narratives by bringing to light alternative viewpoints by a multitude of ‘Others’. This initiative is rooted in her unremitting effort to challenge the norm and bring complexity to the monotone world in which we live. Katarzyna Kozyra is an artist who doesn’t bow and scrape before conformism, and her work acts as inspiration to every person who has ever been told to ‘know their place and stay there, nice and polite’.
