Conversation with visual artist Orshi Drozdik

Orshi Drozdik is a post-conceptual and feminist visual artist. Her work includes drawings, paintings, photographs, performances and videos. The discussion will take as its starting point Orshi Drozdik’s series presented by Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art at Art Brussels. From there, we will explore the following questions: what is the significance of body art and performance in Orshi Drozdik’s oeuvre, and how are these practices connected to other feminist artistic movements in Central and Eastern Europe? What role does photography play in the documentation, presentation, and archiving of performance, and how has Drozdik engaged with this medium? How has Orshi Drozdik challenged patriarchal discourses and art history since the beginning of her career, and to what extent has this evolved in her more recent works? Finally, what are the challenges of returning to a work from the 1980s from a contemporary perspective? Discussion lead by Flóra Gadó curator. Orshi (Orsolya) Drozdik is a Hungarian-born visual artist resident in New York, who was not only one of the defining figures of Hungarian conceptual art in the 1970s but is also an outstanding exponent of international feminist art, a trend that came to the fore in the 1980s. In her works the human body is a reappearing motif and often it can be the medium too. With the concept of using her own body Drozdik is examining the relations to the traditional female role model that appears in physical and psychic spaces and that is fixed in academic discourse. Orshi Drozdik’s figures and shapes are rendered indistinct through the act of erasure. They simultaneously reflect on presence and disappearance, on completeness and absence, on recognisability and unrecognisability, on physicality and sensuality, on freedom, and on the image of female identity in her own times. Photo credit: Carla van de Puttelaar