Wild Exaggeration

Katarzyna Kozyra

The controversial work of Katarzyna Kozyra, who is considered one of the most prominent artists working in Poland today, has dealt with Feminist body politics, focusing on abject aspects of the body such as disease, castration, ageing and death. In her video works and performances, she has merged high and low representations, melodrama and comedy, subverting gender stereotypes. Her strategy consists of exaggeration, parody and grotesque transgression. In her work Appearance as Lou Salomé (2005), she plays the figure of the Russian psychoanalyst known for her romantic ties to the intellectual elite of fin-de-siècle Europe. A stereotypical femme fatale, she elegantly struts through the baroque Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna, reigning in her two dogs - Rilke and Nietsche - played by human actors. Her overt sexual behavior and exposing of female dominance and BDSM-style relations, allude to a raunchy biography and to the affairs Salomé had with the most distinct representatives of high philosophy and poetry. For her work Lou Salomé in Rome, Teatro di Cani (2005), Korzyra invited dog owners with their pets to watch the performance. The dogs' unexpected behavior while meeting the ones played by humans culminates in a humorous, carnivalesque atmosphere, a kind of parody of the transgression of the human animal boundary, as well as a playfully critique of sexual taboos.

Born in Warsaw, 1963; lives and works in Warsaw and Berlin