blood ties - artist statement
I created this work in 1995 under the influence of events in former Yugoslavia.
The symbols of the blood red cross and crescent are the symbols of humanitarian organizations that bring relief to persons in need of help. While making the piece I was thinking about the symbolic metaphor of fratricidal rivalry and struggle over ethnic and religious ideologies.
digital photography, 1996
The work was produced especially for the show "Me and AIDS". On the street, the artist met a man who was beaten. He introduced himself as Krzysztof Czerwiński and agreed to a photo session. The photograph taken of him has been altered in a computer and printed (three prints each 170 x 240 cm). There is a second version of the work as well.
Andrzej Wajs
Balkan war aroused a huge wave of reflection, not only in Western Europe, on the use of religious symbols in military conflicts. For numerous intellectual environments of former Yugoslavia it meant a starting point for the revision of deeply rooted convictions on the relations of religious fanaticism with the cult for violence. While in the West, especially in Germany, public opinion allowed to be easily driven into the trap of "ethnic syndrome", in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia political commentators, first of all women ones (more or less connected with the feminist movement), have stressed the supernational character of the ethnic catastrophe. This is how we should understand the significance of the collection of superb essays published by MIT Press in 2003 under the title "Balkan as Metaphor". They emphasise the conviction that the war supremacy of religious symbols is a reflection of the image of woman as a trophy and sign of exclusion. They show that there is no ethnically conditioned genetic penchant for violence (ascribed arbitrarily to each of the parties of a conflict). They indicate at mass rapes as a metaphor of power, which isn't connected with any nation, but exclusively with the cult of possessing and exploitation. The sufferings inflicted on women are revealed not as an individual disaster and a defeat of civilisation, but as a sign of disgrace of the defeated. In wars, always waged by men, territories and wealth are seized. Yet only the trophies of raped women, carefully laid down at the foot of secondary military emblems, determine the power of the winners and the powerlessness of "disgraced" husbands, fathers and brothers. Desecrated women are a masculine symbol for both the winners and the defeated (who are always men).
Against this background, Katarzyna Kozyra's work "Ties of Blood" of 1995 (the other version of which was shown on billboards throughout Poland in 1999) not only ironically debunks the ethnical myth. It is also, and first of all, an artistic and, as always in this artist, a congenial inscription of the social phenomenon. Several years before the publication of the "Balkan as Metaphor" she exposed the extraethnic, chauvinist sense of religious symbol, intuitively connecting it with the problems of woman's body as the object of oppression. Her billboards have triggered off very radical protests in Poland, because the artist hit the very centre of the common opinion in this country, according to which woman is the symbol of religious subjection. Therefore the "Ties of Blood" are not only an attempt at illustrating the relation between religion and the distribution of images of sex, but first of all the attempt at showing the mechanism of a religious conflict as a "disguise" for the phenomenon which is known today as "Kulturkampf". It is not an accident that all discussions on sexual minorities in Poland always vent inevitably in religious problems. Women, just like gays and lesbians, are the objects of cultural manipulation in these disputes.
The Catholic cross and the Islamic crescent take us on the surge of tourist nostalgia and pseudo-international illusions into regions of Europe we hardly understand, knowing them only from televised news. However, Kozyra's work is mainly a vivisection of our own provincial world, where symbolism, semantic hierarchies and the gendarmerie of the myth have arrested the common sense, taking the freedom of artistic expression under a ghastly tutelage.
