Ujj, Zsuzsi: With a Throne (1986)

black and wjhite photo
Purchased, 2013
Keywords

The poet, performer, entertainer and frontwoman of the band Csókolom who does not identify herself as a photographer or artist, delivered a number of private performances around 1986. The photographs of these performances, which were exhibited in 1987, and the First Booklet, published as a samizdat for the occasion, reveal the unromantic depths of the female psyche (physicality, love). It is no coincidence that UJJ’s work was the first to raise the concept of gender, and thus she was the first Hungarian artist to be included in an international gender exhibition. The photographs, still fresh and alive, sum up the story of a woman abandoned and in love. The story of a woman suffering from loneliness, who goes all the way through the torment of desire. The elemental pain behind the guarded feeling intensifies; the clothed “chaste virgin” becomes a battered victim, then a rebel, capable of stripping herself to the bone (the skeleton painted on her skin), unveiling her humiliated Self-portrait; a humiliated woman on a pedestal (a royal throne), whom only ritual death can save from hell on earth.