JUDIT KIS
- Lucie Blaze
- Apr 24
- 5 min read
artist, researcher
Judit Kis begins from an urgency: the need to stabilize an identity constantly being unmade by life’s ruptures. For the artist and researcher, the creative process is a therapeutic lens through which the personal is elevated to the level of the political. Trained at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, her practice resists the traditional boundaries of the “white cube,” moving through video performance, physical sculpture, and social workshops as permeable modes of inquiry. Her work is a rigorous practice of confessional art, treating her own biography as the primary site of investigation to understand the space around the self, the material, and inherited trauma.
By centering her own psychological processes, Judit challenges the traditional expectation that an artist should look outward before looking inward. She argues that without a clear understanding of one’s own authentic self, there is no stable vantage point from which to view political topics or other communities. This radical honesty serves as a foundation, ensuring that when she eventually engages with social problems, she does so from a place of integrity rather than projection.
Breaking the internal wall
Judit’s journey into materiality began with an act of rupture. In 2012, she built a wall from bricks, the first time they appeared organised into a structured form. The resulting video performance captured this process, though the bricks continued to appear in her later work. This exploration of the brick as a foundational unit of the psyche symbolised the walls we build around ourselves and the separation anxiety that emerges, whether from the presence of the wall, its collapse, or perhaps both. It was a physical exercise in realising that identity is not a static inheritance, but something constantly built, broken, and rebuilt through repetitive behavioural patterns.
This fascination with the “building blocks” of the self evolved into a sophisticated masonry of language. Her installations feature bricks cast from a diverse materiality, ceramic, wood, metal, and stone, each acting as a vessel for the internal landscape. While her earlier works focused on specific, inscribed words like anxiety, desire, or vulnerability, her newer sculptures have transitioned toward engraved drawings and symbols. This shift marks a move away from the specificities of dominant languages toward a more universal, sensory expression that can be felt before it is read.
The digital mirror as a tool for distance
For five years, Judit subverted the economic models of social media, which demand a curated performance of success, by broadcasting her rawest states of grief and isolation. Her performances on Facebook and Instagram, including I Have Never Happened (2016), Cyberlove (2017), and Virtual Performance (2017), offered poignant meditations on intimacy and vulnerability within virtual public spaces. By turning the “cam girl” aesthetic into a tool for radical self-reflection, she created a necessary distance from her own suffering.
Putting her innermost hurt into the public sphere allowed her to view her own trauma from an outside perspective, transforming an internal mental loop into a liberating release. She reflects that if she were a scientist or a doctor, these obsessive thoughts might cause her to crash; however, as an artist, they become the primary fuel for her functionality. Through this process, the “fragment” of a private emotion is cast into a tangible object or image, allowing it to be integrated into a larger, collective understanding of healing.
Portals of Creation as part of Shining/ Ragyogás exhibition at Kult7 Galériain Budapest, Photo: Lucie Blaze
The collective as action plan
Unlearning serves as the primary methodology in Judit’s social practice. Through her Identity Integrity workshops, she moves from the personal to the systemic, identifying the blocks that stifle her community: time poverty, chronic fear, and the financial precariousness of the postcommunist landscape. These workshops are not passive discussions but the development of “action plans” to resist the autopilot behaviors inherited from previous generations.
Judit emphasizes that identity is not something we simply possess, but a repetition of actions.
By connecting as a collective, participants realize they are not responsible for the systemic failures they inhabit, but they are responsible for their response to them. Sharing coping mechanisms becomes a form of rebellion against the judgment and projection that often isolates the individual.
Feminism, care, and material ethics
This activism extends to her choice of veganism and her study of speciesism, which she views as a fundamental rebellion against a patriarchal system that exploits both the female body and the non-human. For Judit, the oppressive systems that destroy nature are the same systems that treat vulnerable humans as disposable. She connects the dots between the reproductive exploitation found in neoliberal capitalism and the need for a decolonial understanding of the world and indigenous cosmologies.
Decolonizing the self is the prerequisite for healing the collective. Whether she is questioning institutional abuses of power in the university system or reflecting on the dark history of healing spaces, her art functions as a bridge to a conscious, decolonized future. She draws parallels between the way we love our pets and the way we ignore the systemic torture of sentient beings, calling this cognitive dissonance a relative of the very ideologies she seeks to dismantle.
Space as protagonist
In her recent work, Judit has turned her attention to institutionalized systems and the subtle ways they can abuse the vulnerable. In a project developed for a former school, she participated in a resistance project, collective action, directly responding to institutional failures and a rape case. By opening up spaces for trauma stories to be told, she aims to break the closed systems that reflect badly on the broader social fabric.
This sensitivity to space extends to the history of the land itself. Reflecting on the Otto Wagner Areal in Vienna, a secessionist church surrounded by a hospital where Nazis once murdered children, she developed the installation Portals of Creation. One body of work carries the weight of memory and transformation, while the other radiates with light, evoking expanded states of awareness.
Through a candlelight ritual honoring the 789 children murdered at the clinic between 1940–45, Judit uses art as a vessel for both personal and collective mourning. In this space, she processes her own experiences of grief while simultaneously reflecting on the site’s dark local history. The ritual creates a fertile ground where memory transforms into a shared intention, reaffirming our connection with life itself.
Portals of Creation, Vienna Photo: Dávid Bíró
What remains
Judit’s work aims to plant seeds of rebellion rather than deliver a final aesthetic conclusion. Her hope is that by exposing her own sentient being, she validates the experiences of others overwhelmed by the information overload of modern life. She encourages a move toward immersive, dark experiments that allow for sensory experiences without the need for immediate understanding.
Meaning does not arrive fully formed; it is a gradual realization that we have the power to change our identity through our actions. In a cultural landscape obsessed with speed and superficiality, her practice insists on a different tempo, one where the personal is profoundly political, where stones speak of grief, and where the space around us becomes a site for active, compassionate reconstruction.
Photo: Judit Kis
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