Tomasz Kozak, "Yoga Lesson", found footage, 2007, 20', film still courtesy of the artist
The exhibition presents a survey of Kozak's treatments on corporality and tragedy through shocking and grotesque imagery
Tomasz Kozak (born 1971 in Lublin) is an artist working in both traditional and contemporary media. He also provides critical commentary in written and visual essays on the iconography of evil, romantic ideologies of the past and the evolution of symbols through the contemporary era. According to Kozak, humanity too quickly forgets the atrocities of the past, exchanging the symbolism of such evils as the Holocaust for relatively vacant icons of contemporary consumerism.
The current exhibition recalls these themes across a selection of works, such as Kozak's 2007 work Yoga Lesson, which explores the many sides of the Aryan myth and its influence on European culture. The myth undergoes a transformation through the consideration of a legend that has Hitler escaping to the North Pole and continuing his mission to defend the Aryan race through a new incarnation of Vishnu. This absurd treatment of the message attempts to weigh new and dangerous manifestations of racial or cultural supremacy that are being expressed around the world. Kozak compares these vile desires for power at all costs to a larval, primitive yearning in both his Yoga Lesson and Negroisation. A metaphor exhumed (2006).
His latest work Flash of the New Flesh is a video essay that builds upon these themes, drawing from David Cronenberg's films and the lines spouted by "The Fly" Seth Brundle: "Look beyond the veil of the flesh! Dive in the plasma pool!" Repugnant imagery is juxtaposed with tenets from key philosophers of early modernity: D.A.F de Sade, F. W. J. Schelling and Friedrich Schiller, as well as the writings of Tadeusz Borowski, Ernst Jünger and Tadeusz Miciński and Freud. He uses found footage to build a narrative scheme that unites symbols of the past and present, suggesting that the extreme and subversive ideologies spouted in contemporary forms of pop culture have a significant impact on the human conscience.
According to the Konstmuseum's Agnieszka Rayzacher:
Tomasz Kozak's work belongs to phenomena in Polish art scene which are most difficult to classify. The artist causes a lot of trouble to art critics, curators and directors of art institutions with his provocative attitude, unwilling to give up and join the prevailing liberal discourse or to left-wing trends, so popular among intellectual milieu. It wouldn't be right, however, to just call him neoconservatist, considering how perverse, rebellious and iconoclastic some of his works really are. Who, then, is Tomasz Kozak? A philosopher, an artist, an archaeologist or a magician? The question is better left open and as we strive to find an answer, it is worthwhile to get confronted with profound, awe-inspiring space of his work.
The exhibition also includes Kozak's Song of Sublime - a compilation of catastrophic frames from popular films about monumental natural disasters, all set to a carefully chosen soundtrack. The work sets out to show how mankind's obsession with the Apocalypse has endured and even intensified through the ages.
As Kozak writes on his blog:
What I was going to do in the film was to make the viewer aware of omnipresenceof pathos in contemporary cinema and, in consequence - of how significant and necessary thisphenomenon is in the structure of collective imagination.
The show opens March 12 and runs through May 1, 2011
Konstmuseum
Stadsparken
Kalmar, SE 392 33
link*www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se*http://www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se****Source: Kalmar Konstmuseum