Orshi Drozdik
1946– · Hungarian feminist artist based in New York
Orshi Drozdik (Hungary, born 1946) is a feminist artist who works from New York and is a pioneering figure of feminist conceptual art in Eastern Europe. Her practice spans drawing, painting, photography, performance, video, installation and writing, and questions the traditional, erotic representation of women.
She studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest between 1970 and 1977. From the mid-1970s she made performances and photographs in Budapest. In Individual Mythology (1975-1977) she appropriated academic images of female nude models to examine their meaning, a line she continued in Pornography (1978-1979). After marrying in 1978 she lived in Amsterdam, Toronto and Vancouver, and from 1980 settled in New York.
From 1984 she developed Adventure in Technos Dystopium, a long-running project that deconstructs scientific representations of truth. Influenced by Valéria Dienes, her work has shaped later artists, and the art historian László Beke regards her as the first feminist artist in Hungary.