SHIFT TITLE

Misfirely Tales: Katarzyna Kozyra

SHIFT DATE       25.6    SHIFT TIME      17:00 - 20:00    SHIFT VENUE      Zagreb Youth Theater POLI

SHIFT DATE (2) 25.6    SHIFT TIME (2) 20:00 - 21:30    SHIFT VENUE (2) Cinema EUROPE

SHIFT DATE (3) 26.6    SHIFT TIME (3) 20:00 - 21:30    SHIFT VENUE (3) Cinema EUROPE

SHIFT CURATOR LEONIDA KOVAČ


SHIFT PARTICIPANTS KATARZYNA KOZYRA, HANNA WRÓBLEWSKA, LEONIDA KOVAČ, FABIO CAVALLUCCI

SHIFT ABSTRACT

This shift combines a presentation of the work of multimedia artist Katarzyna Kozyra with a theoretical and critical examination of her opus from a performative aspect: as a performative statement, in terms of J. L. Austin and his followers, and notably Shoshana Felman, as well as in terms of Judith Butler’s theses on identity as a performative category.

Katarzyna Kozyra works in various media, ranging from photography, sculpture, video installation and live theater and dance performance, to actions directed at subverting the market system which stimulates contemporary artistic production (The Midget Gallery project): all her works are performances (for live audience or camera), and have an indisputably strong performative effect. Since her degree piece Pyramid of Animals, presented at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1993, her multimedia performances have been prominently featured on the international art scene. Her work has infallibly given rise to violent reactions, not only among audiences of different cultural institutions or in critical circles, but also among the general public. This is due to the fact that, in Kozyra’s works, performatives erase the boundary between the concepts of art and of what one may call reality, concentrating on the process of becoming (as explained and elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari) as their very object. This becoming is enacted through transgressing fundamental social norms and ignoring civilization-generated taboos.

In the 1990s, Kozyra’s multimedia installations tackled the fundamental cultural stereotypes based on the binary oppositions of gender, health and illness, life and death. As these works typically refer to canonical oeuvres of Western art, their subtext articulates questions of ethics, i.e. of methods applied in their performance (like putting down animals in Pyramid of Animals, or using a hidden camera in the Bathhouse and Men’s Bathhouse installations).

In 2002, the Polish public was greatly taken aback by Kozyra’s video installation Punishment and Crime, manifestly erasing the line between reality and fiction: on the projection screen and several monitors in the exhibition space, we see an unstaged raid which actually took place. Katarzyna Kozyra documented and participated in one of the so-called paramilitary operations illegally practiced by a group of distinguished Polish citizens – whose identities were publicly only speculated on – among abandoned buildings in a deserted part of Poland. They built their own weapons and made their own ammunition, destroying selected targets without any motive or purpose commonly ascribed to armed operations. In a further twist to the problem, Kozyra covered their faces with masks representing Playboy’s pin-up models, making us wonder whether we are dealing with a reality show, a performance for camera, a form of art or a pastime. This, in turn, leads to addressing the key issues of the need for destruction and violence, and the mechanisms which generate it.

The same year, Kozyra embarked on a work in progress titled In Art Dreams Come True, which has so far had some fifteen live performances in a number of European and North American cities. Her film projects The Winter’s Tale and Summertale originate from the same period.

According to Katarzyna Kozyra, In Art Dreams Come True was conceived when she saw the drag-queen rock star Gloria Viagra perform at a Berlin gay club. This triggered off her “childhood dreams” and an urge to “sing on stage and shine like a star”. She immediately started taking classical singing lessons with the Polish opera singer Grzegorz Pitułej and elaborated a meticulous dramaturgy of her “becoming a woman”. She received instruction in grotesque femininity both from Gloria Viagra and her singing teacher, turned into the character of Maestro with a pathetically exalted operatic method. This bizarre becoming takes shape through artist’s interpretations of Mozart’s Cherubino from The Marriage of Figaro, of Marguerite from Gounod’s Faust, Offenbach’s automaton Olympia and, finally, Mozart’s Queen of the Night.

The first in this string of performances, titled Nightmare, took form of a four-hour multimedia extravaganza at Teatro Civico di Trento in the spring of 2004. It was an “opera in three acts”, with an actively participating audience who had been told they could do whatever they wanted during the performance. The “libretto” of this performance is a literal enactment of Austin’s misfiring: Katarzyna, the protagonist, is about to give a gala concert at the opera, only to realize she cannot sing.

In the series of performances composing the work in progress significantly titled In Art Dreams Come True, Kozyra denounces not only the bourgeois, but also religious and artistic taboos. The demand set forth by her Midget Gallery at the dawn of this millennium is analogous to the one made by the historic avant-gardes of the 1920s: however, Kozyra plays it out by articulating the concept of the fetish in a starkly different manner.

The shift includes a screening of videographed performances and films:

Dance Lesson, Warsaw, 2001

Nightmare, Trento, 2004

Quarter of an hour, Pittsburgh, 2004

Madonna di Pelago, 2005

Madona di Regensburg, 2005

Fassadenconcerto, Vienna, 2005

Apperarances as Lou Salome, Vienna, 2005

Lou Salome a Roma: Teatro di Cane, Rome, 2005

Tribute to Gloria Viagra, Berlin, 2005

Diva Reincarnation, London, 2006

Il Castrato, Bologna, 2006

Cheerleader, 2006 (video clip)

The Winter’s Tale, 2006 (film)

Summertale, 2008 (film)

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Katarzyna Kozyra, Fabio Cavalucci (Director of Galleria civica d’arte contemporanea, Trento), Leonida Kovač (PhD, Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb) and Hanna Wroblewska (Assistant Director, Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw).

The conference will feature Katarzyna Kozyra’s seven-channel video installation Punishment and Crime from 2002.

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