Katarzyna Kozyra

Katarzyna Kozyra's uninhibited performances and videos examine social mores as they apply to gender, aging and illness, religion, and group behavior. Her video installation The Rite of Spring is inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's extraordinary choreography for the composition by Igor Stravinsky, a work that premiered in Paris in 1913. The ballet celebrated a pagan sacrificial ritual in which the frenzied dance of a young virgin transferred her energy to the earth, which resulted in her death. This transmission of energy from life to death to life again signals the cycles of rebirth in all living things. For Kozyra, Nijinsky's avant-garde choreography recalled the movement of marionettes, and she re-created the work as an animation using elderly men and women as dancers. Kozyra positions her subjects lying against a white backdrop and sequences still image after still image to create movement, literally re-animating these less-than-agile bodies with the transfer of her own energy.

Selected Bibliography:

Katarzyna Kozyra. Exhibition catalogue. Helsinki: Kunsthalle Helsinki, 2000.

Katarzyna Kozyra. Exhibition catalogue. Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, 2001.

Katarzyna Kozyra: Laznia Meska. Exhibition catalogue. Warsaw: Centrum Sztuki Wspólczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski [Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle], 1999.

Katarzyna Kozyra: The Rite of Spring. Exhibition catalogue. Chicago: The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, 2001.

Zmijewski, Artur. "Purity, Clarity, Enthusiasm: An Interview with Katarzyna Kozyra by Artur Zmijewski." Work: Art in Progress, no. 8 (January–March 2004): 7–15.

Links:

designboom

The Renaissance Society