In her recent exhibitions, Kozyra continued to explore gender, documentary and dramatic video, and mediated violence.
Previously, in two surreptitiously recorded video installations, Men’s Bathhouse (a prizewinner at the 1999 Venice Biennale) and Women’s Bathhouse, Kozyra observed women among women and men among men (in the latter case disguised as a man), secretly recording bathhouse patrons. She was fascinated by the different behaviors of the two sexes—for example, women’s lack of self-consciousness and, by contrast, men’s intense awareness of one another’s bodies.
Boys featured photographs and videos of a group of attractive young men, nude but for comical “inverted tulip” loincloths that imitate female genitalia. Placed before the camera without instructions, as the artist described it in The New York Times, “They acted like roosters, strutting in front of one another, flaunting their erotic readiness.” In a video shot on a staircase in Warsaw’s neoclassical Zacheta National Gallery, the men stand below a marble statue of a trident-wielding Neptune and (ahem) gently play-fight with long rods. Art- and film-historical imagery is spontaneously re-created; gender behaviors are playfully traded.
Brian Boucher (Extracted from Men are from Mars, Katarzyna Kozyra at Postmasters)
