The starting point of the project Looking for Jesus. Library was a fascination with the cultural-religious phenomenon known as ‘Jerusalem syndrome’. The artist has always been interested in the question of identity and the role others play in constructing or erasing it. In the case of people marked by this syndrome, Kozyra encountered a problem expressed in the question posed by her characters: is there a strong blocking mechanism of denial standing in the way of finding our own identity, introduced into our experience by the ego? And by the Others representing it, with their dictates of single-channel narratives, of which the Man of Nazareth is a contradiction?

The latest presentation of the collection in the Raczyński tenement building on Małachowski Square, just opposite Zachęta is entitled TRUTH BEAUTY GOODNESS.

The compilation of video presented in ursula blikle lounge is a selection of works from the Zachęta video collection. The programme of the thematic screenings of videos is a spectrum, in other words a certain organized selection of phenomena and concepts analysed by the films’ authors. It is a presentation of works of the newest video art in Poland, created by outstanding artists of the young and middle generation. The screenings that comprise the project Spectrum have been divided into the following thematic blocks: sound, gender, social portrait and roles. The selection made was dictated in part by the technical conditions of the place of presentation – the videos selected were one channel projections, whose theme and aesthetics made them appropriate to be shown in the proposed form. The choice of these works was also an attempt to underline the range of themes that Polish video artists engage with. It shows both a cross-section and the spectrum of problems relevant today in Polish art. This should not be treated as a full picture, but rather as an overview of Polish video art of the last two decades.

Nearly twenty years have passed since those events and Zachęta is holding her solo exhibition. This is not a retrospective, although all of Kozyra’s best known works – e.g. Animal Pyramid, Bathhouse, Men’s Bathhouse, The Rite of Spring and the films from the In Art Dreams Come True series – are on show. The exhibition marks a new phase in the artist’s latest project, an autobiographical feature film, for which she is seeking an actress/actor to play the main role – herself.

Invasion of Sound. Music and the Visual Arts proposes a reading of the esthetic relationship between the visual arts and music as relating to culture, rather to cultures. Such an approach can encompass the whole of music and, at the same time, art in its entirety. To be precise, the exhibition pays particular heed to the points of friction between different musical genres, between different esthetic universes, between different cultures. In other words, Invasion of sound. Music and the visual arts aims to reveal how certain musical contexts of particular works disclose a critical distancing with the cultural, social, historic or political norms that the work addresses.

The starting point for the project are murals which, associated above all with wall painting, on this occasion are to be a pretext for a variety of different interventions in/on the architectural interior of the Zacheta gallery. In addition to classical painted murals, the exhibition will also witness the realisation of non-murals: that is to say non-painted installations created from big format prints or other unconventional materials, which somehow reproduce or imitate painted effects.