NEW YORK.- In the history of performance art, especially among female artists, the urge to break the rules is virtually de rigueur and often involves the artists’ naked bodies. The Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra, 39, is solidly in this tradition. Take, for example, her 1999 video installation ’Men’s Bathhouse,’ which won an honorable mention at that year’s Venice Biennale. Ms. Kozyra, disguised as a man complete with chest hair (her breasts concealed by a towel), beard and meticulously designed prosthetic genitalia, used a camera hidden in a plastic bag to secretly film herself among the naked patrons of a Budapest bathhouse. A sequel of sorts called ’Boys,’ a new three-screen installation at Postmasters in Chelsea, marks Ms. Kozyra’s New York gallery debut. In ’Boys,’ young men dressed only in thongs shaped like inverted tulips (a reference to female genitalia) prance around and pose in the lobby of the neo-Classical Zacheta Gallery, now the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Warsaw. Clearly, Ms. Kozyra has gender on her mind. In ’Punishment and Crime,’ another media installation to be shown at Postmasters, Ms. Kozyra films men dressed in combat fatigues and actually engaged in military games with real bullets. She ventures into the surreal by putting female doll masks on their heads. With ’Boys,’ she reverses the surveillance techniques she used in the ’Bathhouse’ installations by expressly inviting the young men to perform for the camera. It seems to have worked. ’They preened before the camera, big time,’ she said. ’They acted like roosters, strutting in front of one another, flaunting their erotic readiness.’