Top 11 Orshi Drozdik Quotes

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.

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

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

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].

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.