Orshi Drozdik Quotes

But there was patriarchal communist political propaganda: “equality,” “emancipation of women” that voiced the political and social rights of women.

Despite and along with this, censored feminism and the art of new dance, the movement art that pleaded the “divine” body resonated in me when I contrasted the experiences of my “bodily existence” with traditional and patriarchal representation of the woman’s body.

In my analysis of the art discourse emerging from the cross-section revealing the interlacement of patriarchal power and knowledge, I was greatly influenced by Valéria Dienes’s feminist writings, who could reconcile her thoughts on psychology, philosophy, and semiotics with the choreography of the art of movement – i.e., the mind with the body, and knowledge with feelings.

I was alone with my intention and could only find precursors in the historical Hungarian feminism that my mother had passed on to me (in the wake of periodicals such as A Nő és a Társadalom [Woman and Society, 1907‒1913] and A Nő [The Woman, 1914‒1917].

When I arrived at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1970, my intention crystallized.

There was no contemporary circle that would support me in these ideas.

I was born immediately after WWII, in 1946. I decided to become an artist at the age of 10, after my father’s death.

By holding on to my independence and autonomy, I decided to make art that I felt authentic, art that was based on the recognition that as a woman, as a woman artist, I feel, see, and think differently.

It is truly frightening for a young woman artist to separate herself from the patriarchal artistic discourse that she learnt from, that does not support her and that she would like to be part of.

I was a follower of the historical feminist movement in Hungary and of the liberating force of the new dance movement which developed within its artistic context, and which I named “free dance”.

I rather consider myself as the pursuer of the ideas and artistic movement of Hungarian feminism that started prior to WWI.