Eszter Ágnes Szabó: Housewife Commando
On view: 2022. 12. 15. – 2023. 01. 28.
Other location: Új Kriterion Gallery (Strada Petőfi Sándor 4, Miercurea Ciuc 530003, Romania)
Curator: Emese Mucsi
The exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest.
Vernissage: December 14, 2022, 6pm
Intermedia artist Eszter Ágnes Szabó circulates in various places, taking up various roles and personae. The deepest zone she enters is the mental space of her as an artist and thinker; this is the space where her visions, ideas, and projects are being formed and created. The zone second most intimate to her is her private life, her home. Szabó’s main personality role is the housewife, who works in the field belonging to the concept of invisible labor, carrying out diverse tasks ranging from child rearing to doing the dishes to other household chores. These are seemingly unrelated unpaid jobs that are nevertheless all essential for the reproduction and subsistence of human life. She is constantly baking or cooking something, and at the pace of a Superwoman, she sews and embroiders, sometimes it’s the clothes of the family for everyday use as a regular homemaker, mother and wife, sometimes it’s the wall hangings, shopping bags, aprons, and tablecloths she intends for the collections of museums, private individuals, and colleagues, defining herself as a homemaker-artist. Occasionally, she even practices her activities of care in public spaces – in the market of Tapolca where, in the spirit of recycling, she brought her repurposed garments otherwise considered outdated; in Budapest, where she harvested fruit from the trees in public areas; or in exhibition spaces, bottling the fruit and initiating the preserves as barter.
Szabó thus moves casually between these zones, wearing a pinafore house dress or some accessories picked up from her Housewife Commando arsenal, slipping into her superhero persona, capable of preterhuman deeds. The apron dress and the superhero attire are actually not that far from each other: both are protective clothing, but while the former fends off the ever-regenerating dust of the household, the latter saves the wearer from extreme external trauma. Both are a hull, a second skin that attenuates the antagonisms between the human body and its environment. Similarly to these outfits, Szabó’s most popular art form, the wall hanging, is also a functional object – it protects the freshly whitewashed wall from getting dirty. Beyond its practical value, the wall hanging, generally speaking, functions as a decorative item and a comic-style household infographic showing the hierarchy and gender roles that prevail in the house, as defined by the head of the family. However, looking at Szabó’s distinctive works, you feel confronted with the seamy side of the traditional pieces – just take a look at the thready outlines of the funny, ironic and at the same time deeply personal scene in which her grandmother, Mrs Imre Zalai meets David Bowie. Whether she embroiders, makes preserves, takes photos, edits videos or kneads dough, Eszter Ágnes Szabó is a virtuoso intermedia artist, constantly flitting across cultural registers, topics, and mediums, inspiring her environment to think about potential overlaps between micro and macro levels, explore analogies and parallels between them, to question the rules, and to interpret and reconsider traditions.
BÜRO imaginaire (Emese Mucsi & Judit Szalipszki)
Eszter Ágnes Szabó’s bio
She graduated from the University of Pécs (HU) with a degree in Drawing and Visual Education, and obtained a degree in Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She founded the Hints Institute for Public Art, which operated from 2000 to 2010. The society researched the ways of art appearing in diverse social groups outside the institutional sphere of museums and galleries with contributing sociologists, anthropologists, and designers. Since the early 2000s, she is a practitioner of ecodesign in Hungary, and also the leader and organizer of the first public workshops in community recycling. Written at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, her doctoral dissertation Libertatia was built on the analysis of temporary independent areas of culture, and sought to place piracy and the punk attitude within the context of contemporary art. She is co-editor of Punk Kitchen Fanzine since 2016. She is a regular exhibitor in group and solo shows, and her works can be found in important Hungarian and foreign private and public collections.
