PORTFOLIO JUDIT KIS
Vanishing Point - Heart & Cherry, Budapest 2024
In her wall installation, Judit Kis is presenting her new brick sculptures engraved with symbols of connection, wholeness and togetherness. concepts, she aims to move towards more universal expressions that transcend the languages of dominant cultures. For the creation of these new brick pairs, Kis drew upon her experiences related to the integration process of grief, separation anxiety and the desire for connection and unity. The wall installation is complemented by a curtain featuring discovery and research on the psychological signs of a vanishing twin syndrome.
Handle with Care at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest 2023-24
Enchanting Souls, (#andalitolelkek) is a new participatory and installative work, encompassing my research on animal welfare, plant based diets and the connection between our digestion and mental health. By recognizing the interconnectedness among various systems of oppression, my aim is to highlight the concerns of intersectional environmental movements and acknowledge animal rights despite the ongoing problem of speciesism. Through this installation, which will be accompanied by a series of workshops and an online performance, I am hoping to develop an educational platform to engage my audience regarding animal advocacy movements and the decolonization of our unsustainable food systems. The workshops are invitations to experience the characteristics of animals and their levels of sentience in a playful way. My endeavor is to create an ethical space for engagements through open discussions to contemplate on the nature of womanhood and motherhood of non-human animals.
The installation; Enchanting Souls is dedicated for workshops with meditations, open discussions and participatory actions.
MQ Artist in Residence of the Art and Ecology program
In collaboration with other artists and performers, Judit Kis develops an installation and participatory performance that questions our perspective on the exploitation of non-human animals.
Collaborators: Anabel Scheffold, Sarah Sternat, Sanna Bo, Milena Annaloro, Crystal Wall, Lana Sharp, Guadalupe Aldrete, Meredith Marks
Participants are invited for a deep meditation with magical objects and a sharing session afterwards. The use of black mirror as an instrument for healing is an ancient ‘technology of the self’ by Mesoamerican cultures. The knowledge is preserved and shared widely by Mexican researchers through the courses and community of Calea Flora.
Dream Meditation with Obsidian Mirrors, Museumsquartier Vienna 2023
SURRENDER, video installation (9.21 min) at Binálé - Queering Democracy, Spring Festival Budapest 2023
SURRENDER 2021-22
The three video works for my solo show Surrender, resulted from my research I started in Mexico on alternative healing methodologies, plant medicines and indigenous community care. I explored and healed some of my own traumas through ceremonies with local practitioners, artists and activists.
The Sanctuary - Healing Strategies in Times of Inner and Outer Turmoil at Motherboard Artspace, Vienna
Tamás Ábel & Judit Kis: STRATEGIC STILLNESS
American Hungarian Library and Historical Society, April 2022
my body gypsy
my body jew
my body cuman my body holy
my body blind my body colored my body whore my body Hungarian — Agáta Gordon, “Trance-spiral” (Transz-spirál)
To grapple with the unfolding crises in their micro and macro environments, Hungarian artists Tamás Ábel and Judit Kis reimagine the recently renovated American Hungarian Library as an inclusive space for rest, reading, and contemplation. actively playing with and occasionally defying its architectural
glass ceilings aim to question the existing heteropatriarchalnate the cultural institutions of their motherland. due to the publication of Fairyland is for Everyone by notions of tolerance, radical care, and collectivity. Their in the show, which have been selected in collaboration with thematic concerns and present a diverse range of authors. from the exhibition.
SURRENDER
Vienna / Budapest
The exhibitions entitled SURRENDER at Kahan Art Space Vienna and Budapest were organised by Dr. Éva Kahán Foundation in January and February in 2022. The two solo exhibition presented Judit Kis’ latest video works and sculptures concerning her ongoing research on self-healing prothat shape our identities, personal boundaries, and behavioural patterns. The artist combines digital content with installations of objects and epands into participatory performances and community engagement. During the exhibition her audience were invited to take part in various activities, such as yoga, meditation, movement medicine workshop and artist talks.
The artist talks were in conversation with Veronika Molnar curator. The yoga class was held by Carmen Vakerle and the movement medicine workshop was facilitated by Meredith Marks healing practitioner alongside with guided meditations and performances by the artist.
‘The unanswered questions that I have never dared to ask’ is a performative group exercise to embody questions that form our opinions and can shake up our intimate connections. Reconsidering the title of an earlier work from her -
er merge into precarity, leaving enormous space for projection, misbelief, prejudices or fantasy. With the intention to create a collective learning environment through a cross-community interaction, her idea is to dissolve doubts around the fear of questioning and hoping to raise more awareness, empathy and understanding of our living conditions.’
Black Tape, Ebony Frame exhibition by Zachary Fabri engagement by Judit Kis RECESS, New York
Healing Garden intensive course by the School of Disobedience. (collaboration) The School of Disobidience is a radical educational program for young women and it’s a project of artist/ coreographer Anna Adam. Our collaboration focused on selfcare and healing practices with the aim to create rituals and a public performance at the end. My task was to facilitate a workshop, which was a long discussion on the issues they wanted to engage with and several feedback sessions.
PERFORMANCE
AND GROUP ACTIVITY DURING THE ‘EARTH IN THE HEAVENS’ POP UP EXHIBITION AT ZXY GALLERY, NYC
(the bricks were wrapped in paper with texts that participants read out loud and painted together)
“Birth of a Common Brick”
A unit to construct, a pattern to repeat; and a wall is already between us. to nature. Similar to the decisions we make or the words we speak - things these blocks within us.
‘I am the mother of everything that’s vulnerable to me’
work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether
‘Love me more than your morning latte!’ a cow whispered
Audre Lorde
‘We already know the idea that freedom can only be exercised if there is enough support for the exercise of freedom, a material condition that enters into the act that it makes possible. Indeed, when we think about the embodied subject who exercises speech or moves through public space, across borders, it is usually presumed to be one that is already free to speak and move.’ Judith Butler
In using her own body and subjectivity as a tool within her confessional art practice, Judit Kis establishes intimacy between herself and the viewer to instill an emotional impression. Focused on self-care and healing, she has recently explored Indigenous uses of plant medicines in ritual and 1950s psychiatric experiments with psychedelics to work through trauma. Creating her own sensory spaces, both virtual and physical, she explores the boundaries of conscious and subconscious existence. confronting harmful cycles through interaction with her installations and performative video series. The meditation on mind and body at a micro level speaks to a larger connectedness between self, society, and nature, bridging mental health with ecological sustainability.
the metaphysical into the material. Users can manipulate them as they self-image, brick by brick. These constructions in the gallery space speak to the formation of identity in the virtual space, whereby a social media user makes similar selections in the presentation of their online selves. The social media series CYBERLOVE occupies a digital presence to create a diaristic account of a failed relationship. Likewise, ruminations on past events, communications, and aspirations in I HAVE NEVER HAPand creation is at the core of her socially engaged practice. Kis earned her MA diploma in Intermedia from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and her process and conceptualization is true to the Fluxunderscores an open view on the role of art. Practitioners of confessional art, Tracey Emin and Félix González-Torres, for example, foreground the artist’s self. However, she takes a step further, inserting the autobiographical into a participatory paradigm where the artist’s self can meet the other. Art is a pathway and Kis paves her own road, brick by brick, and hopes that some are brave enough to follow it.
CURRENTLY ON VIEW - no-longer-being-able-to-be-able https://www.skelf.org.uk/S_Q/Hang/Hang_Section3%20(hang).html
Text by the curator, Hang Li no-longer-being-able-to-be-able began from an urge to think about a shared unease in an over-saturated contemporary life. The limitless consume in order to be able to be. The title of the project refers to Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society (2010), which interrogates contemporary life’s immanent excessive positivity and information. In such a society, everybody becomes an entrepreneur fully responsible for the outcomes of their ‘individual’ lives. In order to be responsible in this sense, people are so busy proving they are able to work, compete, consume and survive. It becomes hard to hold on and ask why we should be able to be able, and for the sake of whom. The predominating fantasies of unlimited growth have rendered feelings of tiredness, anxiety and disorientation daunting and negative. They become symptoms of being fragile, defective and incompetent. These ‘negativities’ have promoted the contemporary myths of health, care, safety and protection. The pandemic, once seen as a chance to suspend and contest these myths, is instead fuel for the continuation of ‘the normal’ in both the art
In response to the neoliberal norm of being-able-to-be-able, no-longer-being-able-to-be-able explores the unease in excessive everyday life from the perspective of labourer, consumer, woman, Queer individual, ethnic minority, teenager, internet user, art worker and an exhausted ‘regular person’. By unpacking the culture of abundance and expansion, this project questions the meaning of be and being able that are underpinned by particular ideologies, powerholders and histories. The works presented in the project aim to explore the possible ways of recognition, articulation and interrogation amid overloaded, oversaturated, and overdrawn beings.
The Hungarian artist Judit Kis was one of the artists who gave a performance during Video Vortex #12 in Malta, in September 2019. This is where I was introduced to her very personal work. In the following months I engaged with her work and decided to approach her foreos, photo documentations, prints, paintings, ceramics, performances and installations consisting of blankets, lightboxes and bricks. She prints sentences on textile
Titles of some of her video works: I have never hap-
Interview with Judit Kis on the (Media) Art of Vulnerability and Care by Geert Lovink
https://networkcultures.org/videovortex/2020/04/13/judit-kis/
I was interested in an online exchange with her because of my recent work on mental statesembracing vulnerability and engaging my audience to connect themselves and others on a deeper level.” Her recent projects emphasize the importance of self-care and rituals in a contechnology. According to Kis “art has a transformative power in our thinking and especially if this art can be bodily experienced and show progresses in personal improvement.” Take herscapes printed on Tyvek paper and a 2 sqm blanket.” Over the years we see her work evolve from diagnosis to therapy, from experimentation with the self through a radical public display where diminished expectations of a harsh neo-liberal society, life in general, and the Other in particular become rich resources for confronting, intimate art pieces. The following exchange took place right before and during the coronavirus crisis, in March-April 2020.
Metonym - exhibition view at MMG, 2019
#cyberlove_
This project consists of an eight month long intagram performance, a video installation with
printed on 70x100 cm tyvek paper and a 200x200 m blanket. 2017
Derkovits Award 2019 - Exhibition view at the Kunsthalle Budapest
I HAVE NEVER HAPPENED – in search of disappearing affections
24.02-06.03.2016
topic | espace d’art independent, Genève
my identity depends on no one..
if u weren’t with me you couldn’t be an artist
What stories we write with our broken affairs? How relationships can become very different stories for those connected to it where is the truth how the things happened really? Are they happened at all? What evidences we have to reconstruct these stories? What objects we are left with? What are these emotional states doing with reality and how these subjective memories can be destructed, rewritten and disappeared. How long and what does it take to be cleaned by all the illusions?
All my works are honest reflections to the temporary impressions that are often repeated themselves in my life. I had an idea to go beyond the genre of my artworks because they are my subjective self-reflections only. I collected letters from my past lovers to reconstruct their memories of our relationship. I was curious to see what effects I made on other lives while they are mostly become the source of my artworks like being an inspiration for a piece.
You’ve been in love with my temporary and limited
- illusion cleaning yoga class
The exhibition was realized through a three week residency program in Geneva. The project included public engaged programs (workshops, lecture, yoga class, screening) a limited edition fanzine and an online performance on instagam (#ihaveneverhappened).
CONTENTMENT
MA diploma project
CONTENTMENT is a mental and emotional state in which a form of happiness is realized through the acceptance of life situations.
The project included a video installation, a thousand piece puzzle and a thesis on identity construction. Eight video in loop; I love you, Enough, Distance, Disillusion, Release, Detoxification, Dedication, Contentment.
