Orshi Drozdik: Adventures in Technos Dystopium - John C. Welchman

As attested by her inclusion in several important survey exhibitions, including The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain at the Wende Museum, Los Angeles (2019–20), Drozdik is one of the most significant Eastern European women artists working in experimental performance and photography before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following her move to New York, she worked in close relation to feminist, critical and experimental literary practices associated with New York postmodernism as it developed from the later 1970s through the early 1990s. Her magum opus, Adventure in Technos Dystopium offers one of the most ambitious and multifaceted inquiries into the constellation of issues in discussion at this time around gendered identities, appropriation, re-photography, institutional critique, cultural memory, and the relation between art and science. She took-on the truth-claims of scientific paradigms including their predicates of change and “progress,” addressing the regimes of repressive power associated with the politicization of knowledge, scientific institutionalization and the defaults and consequences of the scientific production and management of bodies.