Katarzyna Kozyra | Body and Soul: Performance Art - Past and Present (Venice)

Capsule Shanghai is pleased to announce that Katarzyna Kozyra will be participating in the exhibition "Body and Soul: Performance Art - Past and Present", a collateral event with the 57th Venice Biennale, with her work Faces (2005-2006). Faces was featured in Capsule Shanghai’s inaugural exhibition, When We Become Us, 2016. The exhibition will be held from May 13th to November 26th. Other participating artists are Derrick Adams (USA), Aisha Tandiwe Bell (USA), John Bonafede (USA), VALIE EXPORT (Austria), Nicola L (France/USA), ORLAN (France) and Carolee Schneemann (USA).

"Body and Soul: Performance Art - Past and Present" brings together eight performance artists—some historically renowned, others emerging—who will appear in live performances and in video or photographic documentation of their earlier works. Katarzyna Kozyra was chosen for her works’ exploration of the contestation of social roles and dynamics of bodily expression.

Faces, like Kozyra's previous work The Rite of Spring, has to do with ballet. It is also shown in a similar manner formally — the viewer is surrounded by huge screens. What they show is faces demonstrating extreme emotions: above all, intense concentration, tension, and equally intense effort. Clenched mouths, rapidly moving eyeballs, frowning foreheads with trickles of sweat.

The distorted faces turn into masks. Those are the faces of dancers: classical ones, modern ones, hip-hop dancers, captured doing their showpiece performances. They are filmed in such a way that one does not see their bodies, with which they express themselves, which are their instruments.

One only sees the faces, which during the performance are virtually invisible to the viewers. Like in The Rite of Spring, dance itself is being deconstructed here, separated into the individual movements and frames in a process of tedious animation, and then assembled together again, so that in Faces the actor's body is deconstructed. Until now a single whole, it now becomes visible only fragmentarily. Thrown into a circle of faces, the viewer can watch them, while being watched himself.