Zsuzsi Ujj
In the Hungarian alternative art scene, Zsuzsi Ujj was long known as the vocalist-songwriter of the band Csókolom, whose provocatively unique, melancholic songs, conveying the complex emotional-sexual-existential crises of the female subject, found an audience with their unparalleled radical openness. Even At the very time of their creation, these songs and their poetic lyrics entered into a reciprocal relationship with Zsuzsi Ujj's photographic activities, which played out between 1987 and 1992. Ujj’s obvious scenic sensibility, her poignancy devoid of artificial gestures, was inspired by Tibor Hajas—
an emblematic figure of Hungarian performance art, albeit one who was excluded from the semipublic discourses after his death in 1980. Unlike in Hajas’s collaborative performances, however, Ujj worked without assistants, using a borrowed camera and self-timer and receiving only technical help in developing the images. It was the curatorial ambition of the artist Tibor Várnagy and the Liget gallery, which gathered together young photographers and new wave artists from Budapest, that finally brought Ujj’s images to the attention of the public. At her first exhibition at Liget Gallery in 1987, she presented her photographs as 100 x 70 cm enlargements and published them together with her songs in a samizdat edition. Her works were exhibited at Fotogalerie Wien in 1988 and in the United States in 1989, but it was the 2009 “Gender Check” exhibition at mumok and the 2012 Tate exhibition “A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance” that repositioned her in the discourses on female performance artists in Eastern Europe. E.Kü.
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