Kele, Judit: I am a Work of Art - Montage with Weaving Loom (1979/2011)

Judit Kele’s (1944) photomontage was originally made for a competition entitled Textiles without Textiles (1979), but was not included in the exhibition. Kele graduated in textiles from the College of Applied Arts in 1976, participated in the work of the textile workshop in Velem, but also worked as a theatre set and costume designer in the second half of the 1970s. In this bold photomontage, she redefines her relationship with textiles and the art object: she uses her own naked body instead of textiles. The woman’s body, positioned vertically and horizontally on the loom, is both a weft and a warp, the two threads meeting to form a cross-weave. The photograph was taken in Kele’s home, without an audience. The work is both a conceptualisation of textile thinking using the props and basic concepts of weaving, and a reinterpretation of body art and the self-nude through the photographic capture of the body on the loom. This work also marks the beginning of the series I am a Work of Art (1979–1985), a long-term performance process and programme spanning a life stage, in which the artist becomes an art object, behaves as an art object and finally auctions herself as an art object.

Andrea Tarczali