Katarzyna Kozyra

Katarzyna Kozyra (born 1963) is a Polish video artist. She studied German studies at the University of Warsaw (1985–1988). In 1993, she also graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where she studied sculpture and Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Kozryra received a Paszport Polityki award in 1997 as the most promising artist in Poland. Since 1997, she has exhibited internationally at museums 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.

In 2003, Kozyra had received a DAAD grant, and later developed a new form of performance involving operatic singing.

In 1999, she represented Poland in the 48th Venice Biennale where she won an honorable mention and commendation for video installation "Men’s Bathhouse". The piece consisted of the dissected and taxidermied animal bodies of a horse, dog, cat, and rooster and a video depicting the killing of the horse. It was also said that this piece wasn't just, "a work about animals, but a work about death, about killing, and their significance in present day culture". Kozyra became known as a controversial artist because of the notoriety with the installation, but also because of her other works: "Blood Ties" (1995), "Olympia" (1996), "Bathhouse" (1997), and "Man’s Bathhouse" (1999).

In "Olympia" (1996), Kozyra put her fight with cancer and the taboo of naked female bodies on display. Additionally, it was an allusion to the history of art, with works of Rembrandt and Jean Ingres opening and closing the video.

Kozrya has been working on her "In Art Dreams Become True" series since 2003. The series of visual art, music, and performance is released in phases of the project, each as a separate work although they are intended to be combined in a feature film. In the work, Kozrya is "being manipulated as she strives to fulfill her dream of becoming a "real woman" and an opera singer." In 2011, she received the Award of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland for her artistic accomplishments.

Controversy

Anda Rottenberg, Director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art 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 bathhouse 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).