On 6 March 2023 at 7 pm, Katarzyna Kozyra organized her late 60th birthday at the Powszechny Theatre, inviting family, friends, and the public to a party combined with a performance. The artist had the commitment to create the event as part of a grant received from the City of Warsaw. The event took place in the foyer of the theatre with decorative lights and balloons, live music, good food, wine, and, at the end of the evening, a cake like at any typical birthday party. In a central position, lying on a simple catafalque, Kozyra slept throughout, absent from start to finish, while the guests all around toasted, chatted, ate, and drank. 

The reason for this performance is personal, but it also comments on the aspects of reality on a greater scale. The artist was coming out of a period of dealing with a severe depression, during which she felt unable to do anything. However, the performance did not just express her personal condition, but the condition of all of us today, faced with changes beyond our control, overtaken by intelligent technological systems that call into question the meaning of humanity’s survival.

 

The artist commented on the event as follows:

 

I have decided to ‘sleep through’ my 60th birthday. In the dream I fall into, I want to tell myself the story of the last 30 years filled with creativity. The dream is also a text; I will try to remember it and then write it down and pass it on – to myself and to my guests. The film registration of this event will allow me to watch the reaction of the audience, of friends who mean a lot to me, and of casual viewers with whom I always keep in touch, in the good and bad moments of my life. I don’t know what lies ahead for me. Will the awakening be a memory of a nightmare, or will it be transformative? Uncertainty has always been, and still is, the driving force behind my actions, and sleep is the kind of ‘activity’ whose effects are sometimes only found out years later. 

I want you to have fun, I will be with you as the body that has fallen silent. Do not fear, I will return. 

 

This dream into which I will fall is also a symbol of my situation, of my disillusionment with the environment in which art finds itself today, of my doubt in the futility of the spectacle which, endlessly reproduced, plunges Polish galleries and museums into the marasm of repetitive exhibition rituals: producing, hanging and dismantling works. At a time when the world is plagued by war, famine and exclusion. 

 

I want to experience this as a state of hibernation, of release and respite from chasing mirages of success and spectres of inevitable failure. This is how I want to celebrate my 60th birthday. Tell me later what you saw. 

 

Someone once said that in a dream we are all dreamers. Maybe I will recognise one of them as myself?