Discipline

The starting point of Katka Bleichert’s work is the polysemy of the word “discipline”. Known for her unpretentious combination of a firm ideological attitude and craft practice (she runs a hair salon) – thanks to which she attains immediate agency – the artist examines the dimensions of discipline in the context of the pressure to which our bodies are subjected nowadays. Hair is the material she knows best. Characteristic of all mammals, it has gained a unique status and meaning in human culture. The connection of discipline and power, need for control which man has exercised over nature – including his own – throughout history, is spectacularly evident in attitudes to hair. Inspired by the ideas of anthropologist Anna Tsing, Katka Bleichert proposes a different look at human nature. Instead of separating and opposing, the artist tries connecting and identifying dependability. She enters a multispecies territory, trying to demonstrate the inextricable weave of its connections, summoning Donna Haraway’s concept of “companion species”, according to which our life cannot be separated from non-human species it is connected with. “Without them, we would be completely different,” says the artist.

“I intend to separate a hair from a human in the way botanists separate fragments of plants when creating herbaria. They remove the plant from an ecosystem, prepare it and close it in a glass case. By juxtaposing the human with the non-human in this way, I want to show similarities between them.”

Katka Blajchert – after her great-grandfather, grandfather and grandmother, and then her mother – represents the fourth generation of hairdressers in her family. She was raised surrounded by hair, chairs, dryers, combs and other hairdressing paraphernalia. She finished no hairdressing schools, she has been learning the trade at home, since early childhood. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with an MA diploma. She is active in art, taking part in exhibitions and events. She is an artist, not only a hairdresser. Shearing is her life, art and craft.