Poster for Zbigniew Rybczyński's project at Digital Life 2012
Katarzyna Kozyra, Lech Majewski and Zbigniew Rybczyński exhibit signature video works as part of the Digital Life series, which focuses on the body in the context of contemporary art and innovative media
Zbigniew Rybczyński (born 1949) is presenting his latest projects and well-known work such as the 1988 short The Fourth Dimension. He is also presenting a lecture on new visual technologies. As director of the Wrocław Visual Technology Studies, Rybczyński is a proponent of global education and creative research into multimedia technologies of the future. He uses film and electronic media to create visual images that are not mere reflections of the superficial but penetrate the truths hidden deep inside. The artist considers this indispensable to representing and, first and foremost, understanding the real world.
Katarzyna Kozyra (born 1963) shows her video work The Rite of Spring. Made from 1999 to 2002, it draws on the ballet that Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed in 1913 to the score by Igor Stravinsky. Kozyra's work focuses on the final moments of the dance, when the young woman who is to be sacrificed to the God of Spring performs the Sacred Dance. The dancers are not young, nubile bodies one associates with ballet, but men long past their prime, between 60 and 90 years old, their bodies ravaged by time. Their crotches are covered by grotesque oversized genitals to highlight the dance's primitive, brutal nature, and these prosthetics sometimes get in the way of movements performed lying down, to capture the entirety of each movement.
Artist and filmmaker Lech Majewski (born 1953) screens his Bruegel Suite, drawn from his award-winning film The Mill and the Cross. His films are dominated by careful image composition consciously reaching back into art sources, as is illustrated in the Bruegel Suite, based on Pieter Bruegel's painting from the 16th century, The Procession to Calvary.
The exhibition Digital Life is held at the Macro Museum in Rome between the 15th of November - 16th of December 2012, as part of the RomaEuropa Festival, one of Italy's major international art festivals. The Digital Life series shows the body as a place of contact with others, an object of manic attention, persecution, fantasy and phobia, in works by international artists including Marina Abramovic, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman and Paul Thorel.
For more information, see: romaeuropa.net
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Press information, own sources