With a selection of works spanning from 1985 to 1991, Arcadia Missa hosted the opening of the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Words by Julia Silverberg.
Hungarian artist and performer Zsuzsi Ujj often worked alone in her condominium, surrounded by towering lighting setups and body-like tripods. Her short, 7-year photography stint was enclosed in the four walls she locked herself in to produce the work, turning her living space into a built set. A prominent figure in the Budapest underground, Ujj emerged from the post-war wave of neo-avant-garde artists, pushing their sensibilities into the late 1980s as communist rule crumbled. When the Eastern Bloc’s hold on Hungary ended peacefully in 1989, the ulta-tight state restrictions on visual arts dissolved, and with them, the necessity of the “second public sphere,” a network of underground spaces in which these artists had safely existed. The historical pressure to carve out alternative galleries and studios reverberates through Ujj’s quiet works, which seem to hum solitude into nothingness.
Using a self-timer and body paint, Zsuzsi Ujj presses a thumb against raw moments of isolation, as mediated through a characterized version of herself. There is an obvious preoccupation with death in her images. Like eyes slowly blinking, attempting to trace each moment, Ujj wants to absorb solitude into its own being, portraying how terminal isolation links into romantic relationships, self-consciousness, and destiny. In one image, the “dead bride” is alive, posed with a tilted head and a painted-on smile, ready to be given away to her skeletal groom. In others, Ujj plays with wrapping her body in heavy plastic to create a faux-veil, effectively stacking isolations on top of isolations. Even without these synthetic layers of separation, the artist’s later performance pieces took place in venues that felt private; small audiences were kept close enough to touch.
The images have a documentary sheen, revealing Ujj’s thoughts on the body, capturing the specific, melancholic humor that refracted across her life and work. “These photos, taken forty years ago, saved my life at the time,” she tells Elephant. Looking back on them today, even from such a distance, I still feel they are valid and timeless.”
Her timeless examination of feminine autofictions as they apply specifically to photographic image suggests that within Ujj’s work, her truth is not so much buried as it is purposefully disguised. It gives viewers the sense that if they look hard enough, they will be able to uncover Ujj herself, as if she’ll pop from the frame all painted over. Her approach lends to Katie Tobin’s 2024 piece for Elephant, “Why Women are Laying Themselves Bare in Visual Autofiction,” which explores how artists stage interactions for the audience with a self that both is and isn’t the works creator. The female perspective that comes across in Ujj’s work was not originally intended as didactic feminism, but it instead functions to demonstrate how women are forced into everyday performances by the tense structures that exist around gender.
To describe her images, Ujj uses simple, deliberate language. The titles of her works are their own blunt form of poetry. Háttal fóliás / Wrapped from behind, 1986, and Tojásos / With An Egg, 1986 – 2023 are song-like in their brevity. A title is traditionally a psychological anchor for a viewer, but with Ujj, that anchor is denied. Instead, her system of naming creates a type of visual disfluency that creates a deeper interest in resolving the ambiguous nature of the works.
While her various practices lent to one another, after she decided to put down the camera, Ujj founded Csókolom, a group of which she was the lead vocalist. The titles of her photographic works often reference lyrics she wrote, even before joining the group. When she took photos, they were frequently created only after she wrote down exactly what she wanted to see in each image. While she considers the camera a closed chapter, her repertoire of music allows her to relive the feelings across her body of work each time she sings, doing so with the exact same snap as a camera clicks.
