Katarzyna Kozyra, Summer Story. Orphan girl, 2008/2021

digital print, paper, 40 x 30 cm, 29.7 x 19.8 cm (print) signed and inscribed at bottom: VII/XX KKozyra

Katarzyna Kozyra was born in Warsaw in 1963. Sculptor, photographer, author of performances, films, video installations and art actions. She graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In 1998, she completed guest postgraduate studies at the Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Kozyra's work has contributed to the emergence of so-called critical art, and has had a significant impact on the shape of contemporary culture, sometimes being the starting point for a broader discussion. The artist consistently challenges prevailing stereotypes and critically revises socio-political discourses. In her works she moves̨ in the area of cultural taboos and behavioral clichés encoded in everyday life. In 2012 the artist created the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, which focuses its activities on supporting women's activity in the field of culture and art.

A Summer's Tale is the film that closed Kozyra's long-running series In Art Dreams Come True and was a kind of farewell to its protagonists - Berlin drag queen Gloria Viagra and opera singing teacher Maestro. Both appeared in Kozyra's work at the call of the artist herself, to teach her about "womanhood." However, in almost every project in the series - in films, performances, video installations - the artist challenges the popular belief in the "obvious" gender dichotomy and introduces stacked distinctions that disrupt the ability to easily classify people based on their secondary and tertiary gender characteristics.
After years of playing with various cultural clichés, but also playing with conventions, styles, forms and artistic formats, Kozyra shoots the bloody thriller Summer Tale by styling it into a colorful fairy tale, in which she herself plays the role of an innocent orphan girl, the object of fascination of a group of female caricids. The Caricelli - creators and hostesses of a world of norms and prohibitions that is ideal in their conception - try to draw and adapt the film's heroine to it, but they no longer see a place for Maester and Gloria there, as they no longer fit the criteria of normality professed in their world.
The artist's slogan In Art Dreams Become Reality took on a new meaning years later. In view of the ongoing campaign in Poland against non-heteronormative people, the "fairy tale" storyline created a dozen years ago lost its fictionality and became current.

"After all, the world of the caricatures and their beliefs can no longer be treated as a product of the artist's imagination, as in recent years the number of attacks directed against people classified as LGBTQ+ has been growing in Poland. The resentment against representatives of this minority, fueled by representatives of the authorities, has a serious impact on the views of a large part of society. Thus, the once fairy-tale tale of the intolerant world of caricatures is becoming a story of real intolerance towards any otherness, including those with a non-obvious gender identity. In this way, Katarzyna Kozyra's film finds itself at the center of a serious social discourse, the finale of which we still do not know." - says curator Anda Rottenberg.

The 2008 film. A Summer's Tale will be the starting point of a new visual project by Katarzyna Kozyra in Poznań. It will also include a series of original posters and a large-format print of a frame from the film in question - the imprisoned Katarzyna Kozyra as a female fairy tale character - placed on the façade of Poznan's Bałtyk office building. In the artist's idea, it is this figure of a woman with a gag in her mouth that is the ideal of femininity that a large part of society wants.
These new elements, created especially for this exhibition and shown to the public for the first time, will provide a contemporary commentary by the artist on her work.

"Artistic work in itself is outside of time. Its reception, on the other hand, is firmly rooted both in time and in the place where it takes place. The subject of Katarzyna Kozyra's work 10 years ago functioned as a provocation, today it is treated as taboo," says Asia Tsisar, co-curator of the exhibition.

In June 2021, the facade of the Bałtyk office building in Poznań will be the site of Katarzyna Kozyra's artistic intervention. On more than 600 sqm of the facade, we will see Katarzyna Kozyra as a fairy-tale figure of a woman "bound" symbolically by cultural gender norms. Kozyra discusses what it means to be a woman today. It is part of the artist's first solo exhibition in Poznań.