Katarzyna Kozyra

The Rite of Spring, 1999-2002

Loop on 7

Projections Katarzyna Kozyra’s installation The Rite of Spring, takes its title from a ballet scored by Igor Stravinski and choreographed by Vaclav Nijinsky (1913) and considers the larger questions of dance and performance art from a historically informed and critical perspective. Within three years Kozyra has animated and edited together a sequence of movements, frame after frame, 12000 photos. The layered arrangement of the viewing screens emphasises this simultaneity. After the initial filming of the pure movements, the film is animated, accentuating the re-centered gravity of the dancer’s bodies. Despite the animation and perhaps due to it, the jerky and hysteric gestures create the same sensations of urgency and dread that one experiences in Nijinsky's work.

Men`s Bathhouse, 1999

5 screens, 1 projection

This video is a follow-up from Women’s Bathhouse. In Men’s Bathhouse Kozyra, disguised as a young man with a moustache and prosthetic genitals and covering her breasts with a towel, secretly records men in their inner sanctum. Corpulent, frail and elderly, padding about on bare feet or slumped on benches, the men convey anything but confident, world-dominating masculinity; instead they seem vulnerable, contemplative and curiously adrift. Kozyra was castigated for spying on and violating unaware naked males, but the angst she provoked probably had more to do with her visual dismantling of male power.