Vita

Katalin Erdődi is a curator, dramaturg and researcher based in Vienna and Budapest, who works across disciplines, in the fields of contemporary art and performance. Interested in socially engaged art, experimental performative practices and interventions in public space, she realizes projects in different formats, ranging from performance through exhibition-making to more site-specific and collaborative approaches that explore the possibilities of art as social practice and as a tool for knowledge production. Her most recent work explores processes of rural change and post-socialist transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, through collaborative artistic and curatorial practice, with a particular focus on Hungary. In 2020 she received the Igor Zabel Award Grant for her locally embedded and inclusive curatorial practice. 

Erdődi has worked as a curator for art institutions and festivals, such as steirischer herbst (Graz), Impulse Theater Festival (Düsseldorf/Köln/Mülheim), brut/imagetanz festival (Vienna), GfZK - Museum of Contemporary Art (Leipzig) and Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest). She is the co-founder of PLACCC Festival (Budapest), an international festival for site-specific performance and art in public space that she co-curated from 2008 to 2011. As a dramaturg Erdődi collaborates with various artists, including Philipp Gehmacher, Sonja Jokiniemi, Igor and Ivan Buharov, Gin Müller, Amanda Piña, Oleg Soulimenko, Sööt/Zeyringer and Doris Uhlich. 

Recent curatorial projects include Watermelon Republic, a collaborative 'village play' co-created with artist Antje Schiffers/Myvillages, actress Orsolya Török-Illyés, documentary filmmaker Máté Kőrösi and local inhabitants of a watermelon producing region in Southern Hungary (Thealter Festival Szeged, 2021), which forms part of a larger international cooperation Rural Productive Forces, co-conceived by Erdődi and Schiffers; News Medley, in collaboration with artist Alicja Rogalska, folk singer Réka Annus and the Women’s Choir of Kartal, presented in the form of an exhibition and a performance in urban public space (OFF Biennale Budapest, 2020-2021); I like being a farmer and I would like to stay one with artist Antje Schiffers and three farmers from Hungary (Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2017-2018). This research forms part of her PhD-in-practice in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and the University of Reading (2016-on-going), dissertation title: Working Towards a Rural Agonistics - Curating Critical Rural Art Practices as Counterpublics.