Katarzyna Kozyra: Looking for Jesus

Kozyra’s willingness to tackle difficult subjects was nevertheless rewarded with the 1997 Polityka Passport for the most promising artist. Another success followed in 1999, when Men’s Bathhouse received an honourable mention at the 48th Venice Biennale. Speaking today about the Venice award in the interview published in this catalogue, Katarzyna Kozyra says: “That award meant that what I do was accepted.” Her subsequent projects — The Rite of Spring, Punishment and Crime, In Art Dreams Come True, Lou Salomé and Casting — confirmed her remarkable stature and consolidated her position in contemporary art.
Although I had long intended to organise an exhibition of Katarzyna Kozyra’s work, I did not meet the artist until the spring of 2009. I invited her to Atlas Sztuki, but because she was preparing a monographic exhibition at Zachęta National Gallery of Art in 2010, surveying nearly twenty years of her work, and had numerous other commitments, the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki had to wait. We returned to the idea at the turn of 2012 and 2013. Katarzyna Kozyra and Hanna Wróblewska chose Atlas Sztuki as the venue for the first presentation of the complete version of her latest project, Looking for Jesus, previews of which had been shown in Stockholm in 2012 and in Warsaw and Berlin in 2013. Following those presentations of excerpts from the work, the artist spent several more weeks in Jerusalem in 2013, searching for people who identified with biblical figures and experienced what psychiatrists call Jerusalem syndrome. The result was a documentary film which, as Andrzej Wajs writes in his essay, “is not a record of any of the peculiarities associated with Jerusalem as a place. Nor is it a description of a clinical state of ecstatic religiosity. It is a story of lack, absence and longing.” Analysing Kozyra’s latest work, Wajs states: “Looking for Jesus is not a documentary in the conventional sense. It is both a diagnosis and a travel diary kept by the artist herself, who at a certain point realises that she is also telling her own story. If she introduces the word casting into her vocabulary, it is not merely to issue a public call for herself (after all, she has repeatedly played herself, treating her own identity as a costume). The Jerusalem episode allows her to understand the phenomenon of self-identification more fully, because she can now consider it, as it were, from the outside. The principal difference between her and her protagonists is that she has long known that her identity is administered by another (who is, of course, also herself), and that she is merely its tenant (without the right of first refusal); they, meanwhile, are utterly convinced that otherness — including cultural alienation — is a blemish they must erase, and that only by finding themselves will they find the way to Jesus, the guarantor and guardian of their subjectivity. If they feel themselves to be its tenants, it is only with his permission. Like the apostles. That is what this film is about.”
The idea for Looking for Jesus arose while Kozyra was making her earlier project Casting, as she explains in her conversation with Joanna Ruszczyk: “I was holding a casting call in Tel Aviv for an autobiographical film and thought: why am I looking for myself?! I should find Jesus! I had been to Jerusalem several times. Jerusalem syndrome inspired me.” In my view, Looking for Jesus is another important work in the artist’s oeuvre, one that in the coming years will be shown widely in Poland and abroad, in both solo and group presentations and not only in galleries and museums. Following the Łódź premiere, the complete version of Looking for Jesus will be shown at Galeria Labirynt in Lublin from 27 June to 2 August this year.
I recommend Andrzej Wajs’s essay on Katarzyna Kozyra’s work — it is a compelling read. I also encourage you to read the two very different conversations with the artist conducted by Joanna Ruszczyk and the undersigned, in which this outstanding artist shares her well-considered thoughts on art and the contemporary world. What is more, she does so directly, simply and naturally.
It is my pleasure to invite you to Atlas Sztuki for an encounter with Katarzyna Kozyra’s work. It is an even greater pleasure because the presentation of Looking for Jesus has been curated by Hanna Wróblewska.