The Midget Gallery

Katarzyna Kozyra’s project titled The Midget Gallery revolves around an art gallery run by dwarfs – the smallest one in the world and having no administrative structure. Despite its ambiguous status, the gallery takes an active part in some of the most esteemed events in contemporary art. The Midget Gallery is itself a work of art, yet it also functions within art’s institutional framework. The little gallery faces the same challenges as its larger, commercial counterparts: it participates in art fairs, finds works sought by collectors, negotiates prices, and ultimately, organises its own biennale.

2007 saw the dwarfs attend Art Basel show with the goal of acquiring works for a private collection. The search ended with the purchase of a plastic duck with an erect phallus lying in a tub. During the opening of the 2008 Berlin Biennale, the gallery together with Katarzyna Kozyra organised an alternative event – The First Midget Biennale – with all of the particulars associated with such an undertaking. The event served as an occasion to present a set of murals created by the dwarfs in which artworks from the days of cavemen all the way to the era of Art Basel were depicted. This ironic project within a project inclines us to see The Midget Gallery as a reflection on the creation of art history canons. Groundbreaking moments are described by the dwarfs in a jocular way, such as them stating that the creation of art for profit came on the heels of Duchamp’s defeat at the hands of contemporary art.

The Midget Gallery exposes the mechanisms behind the commerce of art and examines the relationship between money and presence on the market. In Kozyra’s project, art is synonymous with the market, while spectacle (like, for instance, the one conducted by the dwarfs during subsequent events) plays the role of commodity. To exist on the international and theoretically free market means being reliant on invitations and funding, and has little to do with freedom and democracy. It all appears to be a tangle of interdependencies and contacts, and Kozyra’s work is raising questions about the relations, not so much of the artistic but of the economic and political kind, between the epicentre of the art market and its peripheries.

Izabela Kopania