lords of dance

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At the start, there is nothing but multiple screens, with hardly discernible pictures appearing on them at random. Next, the same two figures appear on several screens, in different poses and situations: proportionally built young men with golden (quite literally golden) skin, making strange moves, gestures, and arrangements... At times, they look like gilded Greek statues, like pagan idols - but this "classical appearance" is disturbed with colorful crash helmets they are wearing. They are almost inseparable: often, embraced, they look like one creature with two colorful heads (the helmets!) and many limbs. They travel across unidentified interiors: an empty white room and deserted factory halls where all activity has long ceased. They look like statues brought to life or like two astronauts inspecting an unknown planet. A camera appears in their hands: they point it candidly at either themselves or the surroundings. What they are thus documenting is not only the reality but also their own — the outsiders' — appearance and conduct in that reality. Testing each other, they perform a series of acrobatics: jumps, leaps in the air, summersaults, which together make up a kind of narration. They act together, helping each other. Their faces in close-up show fatigue, pain and exhaustion, but sometimes also a near-perfect indifference. Their accompaniment are the sounds of motorcycles (motorcyclists driving around in circles can be seen on another screen) or pompous music that sounds like the soundtrack of an SF film on the conquest of an unknown planet. Motorcyclists, statues, body-builders, comic strip heroes, astronauts, idols — all those personalities or rather costumes can be found in the two golden boys. Masculine heroes in testosterone-filled bodies. The muscle-packed bodies are again the basic costumes which bring up so many associations. It would be difficult to read just one story here: it is as if we were watching just some fragments of the Odyssey or a long film; as if we glanced through every third page in a comic book or played a computer game where a virus mixed all levels, narrations and scores, and the player no longer controls what is taking place on the screen. The heroic poses, tense muscles, pain and effort reflected on the men's faces suddenly grow as comical as a pointless effort or old SF films seen many years later, when the special effects seem annoyingly simple and the narration — naive. The 2002 Planet of Apes, where the survivor — the alien and different golden creature from space who looks like the human being (and who is sometimes divided into two persons) lands on an unknown planet and examines it only to find out that it is the very same Earth from which he had originally started his journey many years ago, in a different shape.
This Odyssey is not the first one among Kozyra's works, where — examining the essence of the male nature — the artist provokes her models to play parts that belong to the canon of a male hero (conqueror, idol, warrior, gladiator, discoverer). Instead of actually designing such roles, she merely creates situations in which the men spontaneously take them up, drawing from stereotypes recorded in their memory. In a video work of 2001 entitled "Boys" and composed of three very short films (clips) of several minutes each, almost naked boys, dressed only in pants resembling the female vagina, were put in front of the camera with no guidelines or instructions from the artist, and were expected to find themselves in this unfamiliar situation. "I put them in an uncomfortable situation — nothing was happening, but I clearly expected them to do something", the artist said afterwards. "Therefore, they tried to think of something to satisfy me. They started to behave like roosters, ruffling their feathers and manifesting their erotic readiness. A true explosion of Narcissism... They showed off and lured one another. This smelled of homo-eroticism, the climate of Wilhelm von Gloeden's photographs. It was most interesting to watch them: whenever one of them conceived a trick, another one hurried to pick it up. Watching the footage I felt as if I were in the zoo. [...] I positioned them on stairs and they started to disassembly the structure. They removed the bars that hold the carpet and posed with them. One started to sing, using the bar as the microphone, while another one imitated Jesus Christ and pretended to be crucified on two bars. They were enslaved each to different ideas, and reproduced each a different pattern. They were moving around on the stairs and then, suddenly, one of them removed a bar. Another one saw it, and soon they all had pieces of iron in their hands and stood there like warriors with their spears. Immediately, they started to show off, bragging about what they could do with their spears. Gladiators, the whole bunch of them." In another video installation "Kara i zbrodnia" [Punishment and Crime] of 2002 Kozyra joined a group of the lovers of firearms and explosives at a firing range where they were testing various types of weapons. Here, the boys' faces are hidden behind masks that imitate the faces of actresses and pin-up girls, and they all wear wigs. The rest of it, however, is quite genuine: cartridges, exploding cars and buildings, splinters hitting the camera, the adrenaline-and testosterone-loaded atmosphere. Just as genuine, despite the arrangement, is also the comical-heroic story from the Odyssey, where the golden boys show off demonstrating their fitness and ability, and confirm their masculinity with leather jackets and motorcycle helmets. The artist's exploration of the men's world, initiated when she entered a Budapest men's bath disguised as a man, is still going on...

Hanna Wróblewska



From Eternity to Here
Despite the artist's ostentatious protests, Kozyra's works are contained in a strictly defined environment: the world of antinomies that permeate our culture, where power and importance follow not from a changing arrangement of natura forces, but rather from an inherited system of privileges: superiority of one gender over the other one, or prevalence of a specific value. The artist's provocation is that she shatters the existing system, revaluates and reverses the traditional social roles. Of immense importance in those works is the viewer in a variety of interpretations: now an individual recipient, now a group, the public opinion. The viewer's role consists in active intervention in the area of the exhibited work. It is only through the viewer's intervention that the work can be developed to the full. In this sense, Kozyra's works are saturated with the immediate interest of the period and time in which they emerge. The "pure subject" would never understand them — yet such "pure subject" is not the addressee of Kozyra's art...
The prevalent motives of that art include the body with all its implications with which not only the Polish public are well-acquainted by now: gender relations, the role of sexual rituals, functions in the body's various states: of being seen and used, but also of seeing and using others.
Kozyra's latest work is something of a surprise in this context. On the face of it, we still deal with the old scheme: everything revolves around the axle of carnality. What we see on the video monitors are young men performing a series of evolutions. Yet the picture attacks the viewer not exactly with its presumed sense, but rather with the very aesthetics of the succession of events. Of course, as was the case in the artist's previous works, a specific cultural context can be noticed here. The individual picture sequences make us think of the circus, of comic strips, a forgotten science fiction film. The naked young men imitate moving statues, crash helmets make them look like motorcyclists (of the half-naked kind, on the lookout for young boys, whom you could encounter in the streets of Rotterdam early in the 1980s). The film cameras that sometimes appear in their hands suggest the narcissistic syndrome, as the lens are pointed at themselves. All of this seems to be the long-familiar world of the artist's obsessions.
And yet something has changed. The scene is taking place, so to say, outside the theatre that has been so very characteristic of Kozyra's other works: the theatre which we entered to live an artificially created life. The golden boys still perform the roles inherited from the tradition; the ritual remains in force. What is missing is only the viewer (is this perhaps the reason why the camera appears inside the picture: because there are no more people outside"). They both come from a distant world — but it was us who sent them there a long time ago. Due to a time cataclysm, they return to the Earth in the period of Human Being's Extincion. No more human life here: a sinister plan was implemented that had been conceived by an organization against man, which persuaded humans to commit suicide in the interest of Nature. Even Foucault and Derrida died, as did also their successors. Thus the space gladiators return to the Earth that is no longer inhabited, to one that is empty. Hence the aura of desertion, tragical and at once also comical, that radiates from the pictures. The loneliness of a statue that no person can understand. Uselessness of a gesture that is not extended to the viewer's space.
This unexpected paradox of Kozyra's latest work provides ample feed for thought. Above all, it once again confirms her pertinent diagnosis as to the importance of differences and the role of conventionalities in the creation of social situations. Overcharged with nonsensical pathos, the male gesture of sexual domination hits the vacuum if its addressee, be it a man or a woman, violates the convention or offers a gesture from another convention in return. What does this mean" Just one thing: that gestures only have power within a space that has been ritualised in advance. In a space that lacks rituals, gestures make no sense. The symbol of such space is absence. Without the viewer, the gesture of domination is but a ridiculous dummy. This is also the difference between Adolf Hitler in front of Brecht's mirror and that same Hitler who repeats that same gesture in front of two million people who share his creed and convention.
Whether consciously or not, Kozyra demonstrates in her work the turning point also in her own consciousness: perhaps, an emerging need for a naked world without meanings, or for return to the state from before the convention, even if those who know the artist will find it hard to believe. And yet the loneliness of the golden boys and the sadness and resignation of their gestures are alarming questions marks.

Andrzej Wajs