Reperforming the Self - A conversation with Katarzyna Kozyra

Reperforming the Self: Confession, Construction, and Critical Art Now

A conversation with Katarzyna Kozyra

Moderated by Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director of International Program at The Museum of Modern Art

This public conversation with Katarzyna Kozyra marks a critical moment in the artist’s 25-year trajectory since receiving a Kosciuszko Foundation grant in 2000, which initiated the international phase of her career in the United States. The event offers a rare opportunity to reflect on the evolution of one of the most pivotal figures in Polish contemporary art, widely recognized as a founding voice of the Critical Art movement of the 1990s.

Throughout her practice, Kozyra has engaged themes of gender, illness, memory, aging, and cultural exclusion, often confronting viewers with provocative, unflinching expressions of embodied experience. Her groundbreaking works like Olympia (1996), Bathhouse (1997), or Men’s Bathhouse (1999), disrupted beauty norms and challenged institutionalized perceptions of the body and gender roles through radical visual honesty.

The discussion will also explore her use of repetition and reenactment as tools for confronting bodily memory and shaping autobiographical narrative, most notably in The Rite of Spring (2002), in which the aging body becomes a site of both aesthetic reflection and political agency. Kozyra continues to probe the ethics of confession and exposure, navigating the complex boundary between private vulnerability and public performance.

Together, we will reflect on the continued relevance of critical art in today’s era of media saturation, algorithmic visibility, and soft censorship examining how subjective narratives and corporeality remain potent instruments of resistance against dominant cultural structures.

This program is presented in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Galerie Christophe Gaillard

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