Katarzyna Kozyra
Olympia (White), 1996
digital printout
courtesy of the artist

In a photograph inspired by Édouard Manet’s famous painting Olympia from 1863, Katarzyna Kozyra depicts herself undergoing chemotherapy, bald and without make-up. The attribute that helps identify Olympia is a thin black satin ribbon tied around the artist’s neck. ‘I allowed myself to be photographed naked while on an IV drip to prove that a sick body is just as dignified and normal as a healthy one. When you look good, you don’t think about how your body works. When you look at a sick body, you feel its mortality. All healthy people are fine because they don’t have their biology on display. And they walk around in perfection,’ she explained.

This photograph is part of the Olympia series, which consists of a video (in Zachęta’s collection) and three large-format photographs. The video documents a visit to the nurses’ station, where they are trying to insert an IV drip into a cancer patient. The other two photographs show Kozyra in a setting reminiscent of Manet’s original and a naked elderly woman in a contemporary flat, also with a black satin ribbon around her neck.

The artist became the model for this project by chance. Originally, it was to be her hospital roommate Magda, who was suffering from the same disease — Hodgkin lymphoma. Unfortunately, Magda died before the shoot could begin. Kozyra does not present illness as something to be ashamed of, not to be shown because it clashes with the ideal image of the female body. In the 19th century, Manet shocked by depicting nudity without unnecessary embellishment, Kozyra reveals the truth of the naked, sick body.