Katarzyna Kozyra: The Bathhouse

About the Exhibition

The Bathhouse is an installation that includes one video projection and five images on video monitors. It depicts women in the act of bathing, having been filmed (without their knowledge or consent) in a public bath in Budapest. The video projection opens with the image The Turkish Bath, a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The painting, which depicts women as idealized figures fitting perfectly into a circular composition, provides a stark contrast to the Kozyra’s footage, which follows. Her video of overweight, aging, imperfect female bodies is astonishing in its realism. Katarzyna Kozyra made headlines as the Polish representative at the Venice Biennale with her video piece entitled The Men’s Bathhouse, for which she gathered footage by entering a men’s bathhouse in Budapest carrying a hidden camera and disguised as a man.