Blood Ties (Wiezy krwi) Katarzyna Kozyra - 1995 The first version of the Blood Ties photograph was presented in 1995 in response to the war between Christians and Muslims in Bosnia. Four years later, Blood Ties 2 was created in response to the war between Christians and Muslims in Kosovo. The intention was to bring into focus the violence and suffering inflicted on women by the clashing religions. Each of the panels features a naked woman – the artist herself and her disabled sister (with an amputated leg) – on the backdrop of a red cross or crescent surrounded in two panels by cabbages and cauliflowers. The women themselves are posed to appear as casualties, connoting surrender, fear, vulnerability and hurt; an impression underscored by the non-commercial realistic nudity of the female body and the disability of one of the sisters. Blood Ties 2 was to be exhibited as public art on 400 municipal billboards in the major towns of Poland as part of an outdoor gallery project. The Catholic Church protested the blasphemy and allegedly unholy usage of religious symbols. They interpreted the women as menacing and not as victims. Only the bottom two panels were eventually allowed to be displayed on a few billboards, but the pictures had to be modified so that the cross and the crescent became indecipherable. The antiwar message was consequently lost. Concealment of the billboards was a benchmark example of stifling public debate of women’s rights in the context of religious claims. It was the first post-communist example of religious norms with heavy-handed pretensions to universality, taking precedence over the civil rights and autonomy of individual citizens.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 19:03:42 +0000