Tibor Hajas

In spite of his early death, the action and performance artist and poet Tibor Hajas counts among the most important Hungarian artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His performances, which were staged without an audience and were only documented by a photographer, strove for a holistic experience between life and death in which he—like the Vienna Actionists—explored his own physical and mental limits, where the body is used to extremes in order to hint at the dichotomy between political repression and bodily confinement. D.H.