The Third Eye – Katarzyna Kozyra

A music video in which Kozyra interprets Gwen Stefani's song What You Waiting For. Playing with stereotypes of womanhood and manhood, the artist impersonates not an opera diva this time, but a pop star acting as a cheerleader in a sportsmen's changing room. Performing an acrobatic dance (with choreography by Anna Godowska) in a short white dress and with pompons, Kozyra tries to attract the attention of the sportsmen changing their clothes after training, focused actually on themselves. The choir includes curators and managers of the Zachęta gallery.

At first, the audience of this performance witnessed a projection - a pre-war photo of a diva in a cage with a lion - accompanied by an overture to an aria played on an analogue recorder. The image slowly faded away and then the artist was carried onto the stage - this time disguised in the body of a fat woman, a costume made of special foam from a mould of a real body. The artist made a parody of opera - Dorota Jarecka wrote - and of an opera diva who struggled into a stylish dress to sing the part of a young girl. Here, by contrast, the singer's huge body was outside and the girl was inside. Completely hidden in this costume, the artist performed the aria of Olympia - a soulless doll of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, accompanied by Maestro.

The concert was held on the façade of the Kunsthalle in Vienna. Every hour, on the portico of former royal stable, on the first floor level, a blue-stripped booth moved out and Maestro led Kozyra out of it. Nearly every time she wore a different dress (inspired by Oskar Schlemmer's geometric costumes) and, guided by Maestro, she sang - better or worse - the same Aria of the Queen of the Night from Mozart's The Magic Flute. The concerts' were watched by casual tourists. The effect resembling a mechanical cuckoo-clock emphasised and yet compromised the conscious imprecision: the aria sounded slightly different each time, the costumes were purposefully imperfect and the cuckoo never managed to leave the booth bang on the hour.

The gay festival Gender Bender co-produced the performance maintained almost in the model form of a one-act baroque opera. The finale is the scene of castrating Kozyra - a drag queen spotted in the crows by Maestro and Gloria Viagra. When dresses and wigs are taken off, she 'regains' her androgynic looks and the false body and genitals make her look like a young boy. After the scene played by those who were supposed to teach her 'femininity', the artist sings Schubert's Ave Maria and finally she rides off on a white horse. In previous parts of this series Kozyra attempts to impersonate, transform into, disguise as a woman - princess - star. In this episode she returns to her boyish looks to have herself almost literally castrated.

A para-documentary telling the story of the project In Art Dreams Come True, starting from Kozyra's fascination with Gloria Viagra, to the first singing lessons with Maestro and 'lessons of femininity' with Gloria, to performances on stages at clubs and theatres to the final scene of castration at the Bologna San Vitale theatre. The entire project is concluded by Kozyra who says dashingly directly to the camera: Anyone can dance, sing and act. And this omnipotence of mine gives me certainty that whatever I undertake, I'll succeed, because I'm talented in every domain.

elaboration: Hanna Wróblewska

The event in Pelago, a small town in Tuscany, resembles a religious procession and a folk festival. Four men carried a sedan chair with a figure of Madonna on a crescent, whose face was a mask of Kozyra and who held an open umbrella in her hand. The procession was led by Maestro, wearing a rat mask and a purple cassock of a cardinal, moving in dance-like steps to the rhythm of Olympia's aria of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, played on mobile recorders. After having reached the hill, the figure disappeared and the audience saw a blue coat flying into the sky. At the same moment Kozyra, wearing the costume of a courtesan, appeared on the hill and she sang the same Aria of the Queen of the Night from Mozart's The Magic Flute, conducted by Maestro.

The first part of the series of performances and events of the project In Art Dreams Come True presents a dream of Katarzyna Kozyra, who is here an opera singer on the night before the performance. At the beginning, everything goes as usual, but then, each act is a deepening of the tragedy of the singer, who cannot sing and doesn't know the text, while the over-elegant audience pays no attention to her. Rejected even by her Maestro (Grzegorz Pitułej) and finally replaced by a better singer, she burns at the stake in shame.

A fairy-tale-convention feature which changes into a gore-style horror in the finale. The plot is set in a fairy-tale house and garden where a group of female dwarves lead an idyllic life. Their harmonious and orderly world is penetrated in a magical way by Maestro, Gloria Viagra and the artist herself, disguised as Alice in Wonderland. At the beginning, the new-comers attract interest and are treated in a friendly way. But they are different, which breaches

the unwritten law of the fairy-tale garden and ultimately leads to tragedy. The appearances of kindness and openness hide hatred and fear of strangers.

At a birthday party of Gloria Viagra - the drag queen from Berlin - at the Big Eden club, Kozyra performed during the interval of her concert as a 'surprise' for Gloria. Disguised as Gloria, almost her clone in high-heeled shoes, wig and with strong, theatrical make-up, Kozyra sang a Robbie Williams song for Gloria and then performed a strip-tease. In the crucial last moments of her art performance, the artist appeared to the excited, though confused audience only in stockings with a bag on her shoulder and a false penis, which she 'took off' in a moment and put inside the bag.

For the first time Gloria Viagra and Maestro, who fight for the body and soul of their pupil, Kozyra, meet at one place in equally important roles. And the pupil is transformed into someone like Snow-White, living with dwarves in a strange boarding house in the middle of the woods. The film with its 'incomplete', as if imprecise, plot seems to combine and blend not only various myths and stories, but also different film styles: horror with melodrama and comical elements, contemporary fairy-tale with a historical film or musical with opera and operetta. The 'feature film' is also a documentary of a disaster, recording the artist's struggle to force herself and everyone around into a convention only to blow it out from the inside.