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Katarzyna Kozyra
Using strategies of infiltration and exposure Katarzyna Kozyra’s
works confront myths, taboos, stereotypes and bizarre rituals that speak
of the hidden and more unsavoury aspects of human nature and private behaviour.
Punishment and Crime depicts a group of gun enthusiasts engaged in a bizarre
and disturbing ritual hobby which involves spending their week-end leisure
time engaged in the ‘playful’ use of variety of firearms with
the ‘simple’ intent of causing destruction. These mindless,
purposeless acts and the fetishistic fixation with violence points to
one of the more animalistic and inexplicable, absurd, aspects of human
nature. More so because these acts take place without the ‘excuse’
or ‘justification’ of any accompanying ideology, politics,
or logic.The fact that the faces of the participants are camouflaged with
masks representing faces of actresses, pin-up girls or Playboy models
makes the ritual even more threatening and disturbing. It creates a deliberate
gender confusion which, perhaps tellingly but accidentally, challenges
the stereotypical notion that women are not prone to violence.
Punishment and Crime, 2002, dvd, 3 minutes , 3 masks,
unique, courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York
About the work
HIGH-END SHOOTING clubs and paintball warfare are popular ways for grown-ups
in America to nostalgically recreate the war games they played as little
kids. Kozyra's new video installation depicts a group of Polish gun enthusiasts
who have taken the game to an extreme. They spend weekends firing vintage
World War II rocket launchers, machine guns, and flamethrowers at cars,
buildings, and other targets they build for the express purpose of destroying
- with no accompanying ideology, politics, or logic.
The title of the work, Punishment and Crime'', is an ambiguous reversal
of the Dostoyevsky novel in which Raskolnikov's guilt for committing a
crime creates the necessity for punishment and absolution. Here, the act
of destruction is itself the punishment. Here we developed the need to
destroy as a result of too many movies and no real war" And does
the final monitor, which shows the participants hanging in a tree like
lynching victims, indicate the crime or is the crime the reality of war
these weekenders simulate" Kozyra never supplies answers or resolutions.
As in her previous works - like ''The Pyramid of Animals" in which
she notoriously witnessed the death of and even killed animals, had them
stuffed, and then used them in her sculpture - Kozyra is implicated in
the transgressive "crime" of the act. She collaborates with
her subjects, wins their trust, and stands beside them, shooting video
as they fire their guns. She unflinchingly experiences and then presents
an uglier side of humanity, one that we might prefer to deny the existence
of, as in her bold portrait piece Olympia which showed her receiving treatment
for Hodgkin's disease.
Her ongoing engagement with sexual identity surfaces here in a gruesome
twist as the participants maintain their anonymity by wearing cheap masks
of girls' faces. No other mask would cast their gender into such doubt:
instead of just assuming they're male, you are forced to search for clues
in their hands and bodies. The masks are so absurd you have to wonder
how she persuades them to put them on. They must have wanted to protect
their identities because of fear of being identified, but doing so at
the cost of losing any semblance of machismo makes one wonder if they
were also desperate for the legitimizing force of any media presence or
exposure. The raw power of the documentary footage is tempered by the
tension of this artifice, making the action seem staged, unreal, and in
some twisted way, almost empowering to women.
by Franfiska and Tim Gilman-Sevcik
One of the most visible and successful young artists to come from post-Communist
Eastern Europe in recent years, Katarzyna Kozyra turns documentary footage
into confrontational, undeniable artworks lacking irony or distance. Frantiska
& Tim Gilman-Sevcik chose to write about this work because of the
striking senselessness of the violence it shows.
Above text taken from Summer 2002 issue of Flash Art, No. 111
www.katarzynakozyra.pl
www.postmastersart.com
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