The taboo of the naked female body is also the subject of Olympia (1996). The work consists of a photographic triptych, a reference to Manet's famous painting, along with a video showing the artist, who had suffered from cancer since 1992, as she is given chemotherapy. Unlike Manet's Olympia (which was also controversial in its day), Kozyra portrays the female body as being old or ill. In so doing, she not only exposed social stereotypes of the female body -- which are generally dictated by the "male gaze" -- but she also breached the prevailing aesthetic canon.
Łaźnia męska (Men's Bathhouse)
It is no accident that the video installation Bathhouse (1997) begins and ends with paintings by Rembrandt and Ingres, showing that the canon of beauty in art is variable. For this project, Kozyra filmed the interior of a women's bathhouse with the aid of a hidden camera. The elderly women, immersed in personal hygiene, seem to naturally assume poses from old masters' paintings. Yet once again, the artist was confronting the viewer with a vision of aging, excluded bodies. This was the first time Kozyra thoughtfully arranged her videos throughout the exhibition space, a strategy that she continued to use in her future projects. But Łaźnia męska (Men's Bathhouse), shown at the Venice Biennial in 1999 and conceived as a supplement to Bathhouse, cast the original work in a new light. This time, the artist had to disguise herself as a man in order to be let into the bathhouse in Budapest, donning a fake beard and a silicon penis. Once inside she was filmed by her friends, who had smuggled in cameras. Thus, the artist was able to gain access to a men's world that had been hitherto inaccessible to her, and she found that the men's behaviour was very different from the behaviour of the women in Bathhouse. The women, out of reach of the male gaze, engaged in personal activities and appeared not to notice each other; the men, however, still seemed to be conscious of the presence of others.
Kozyra examined the rules of male behaviour more closely in the film triptych Chłopcy (Boys, 2001-2002). Here, a group of young men was placed in front of the camera without any instructions, dressed only in sashes that looked like vaginas; still, the way they behaved was mainly an expression of sexual potency.
Święto wiosny (Rite of Spring)