A comprehensive overview of Orshi Drozdik's practice in the first decades of her fifty-year long career, including several of her writings.
As attested by her inclusion in several important survey exhibitions, including The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain at the Wende Museum, Los Angeles (2019–20), Drozdik is one of the most significant Eastern European women artists working in experimental performance and photography before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following her move to New York, she worked in close relation to feminist, critical and experimental literary practices associated with New York postmodernism as it developed from the later 1970s through the early 1990s.
Her magum opus, Adventure in Technos Dystopium, offers one of the most ambitious and multifaceted inquiries into the constellation of issues in discussion at this time around gendered identities, appropriation, re-photography, institutional critique, cultural memory, and the relation between art and science. She took-on the truth-claims of scientific paradigms including their predicates of change and "progress," addressing the regimes of repressive power associated with the politicization of knowledge, scientific institutionalization and the defaults and consequences of the scientific production and management of bodies.
Orshi Drozdik (born 1946 in Hungary) is a post-conceptual and
feminist visual artist. Her career began in the early seventies under the Socialist regimes of Eastern Europe. Her work consists of drawings, paintings, photographs, etchings, performances, videos, sculptures, installations and academic writings through which she exposes social issues that are embedded within our cultural system. By exploring themes that undermine the traditional and erotic representation of women Drozdik has had a significant role in the history of women's art and has greatly influenced a generation of artists to follow.
