One on One: Interview with Anna Zilahi, Missa Echologica (2021)

Anna Zilahi – Laura Szári – Varsányi SzIrének. Missa Echologica, 2021. Video. Image courtesy of the artists. Photograph by Gergő Ofner.

This podcast is part of the One on One series, which presents timely encounters between ARTMargins Online editors and contemporary artists, focused on one work.  It was recorded on the occasion of the recent online release of Missa Echologica, a video piece. Zsuzsa László interviews the Hungarian artist and poet Anna Zilahi who created this work in collaboration with Laura Szári and the Varsányi Szirének feminist choir (Blanka Bolonyai, Dóra Ferenczy, Bettina Horváth, Dóra Király, Rita Szántó, Laura Szári, Diána Takács, Eszter Tóth, Virág Török, Anna Zilahi). Gergely Ofner was in charge of photography. The work was introduced during the OFF-Bienniale Budapest this spring, as part of the ACLIM! Agency for Climate Imaginary exhibition curated by the xtro realm artist group.

Zsuzsa László

Zsuzsa László is a researcher and curator at Central European Research Institute for Art History, Budapest. She is a member of tranzit/hu’s board and the editorial team of ARTMargins Online. Her forthcoming dissertation discusses the emergence and critique of the concept of East European Art. Recent projects and publications she has co-curated, co-authored, and co-edited explore transnational exhibition histories, artist archives, progressive pedagogies, cultural transfers, and decentralized understanding of conceptualism and neo-avant-gardes in Cold War Eastern Europe, including Resonances: Regional and Transregional Cultural Transfer in the Art of the 1970s (2021-2023), What Will Be Already Exists: Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central Europe and Beyond (2021), 1971: Parallel Nonsynchronism (2018/21), Creativity Exercises (2014/15/16/2020), Sitting Together (2016), and Parallel Chronologies (2009–21).

Anna Zilahi

Anna Zilahi is a poet and transmedia artist. Her often participatory text- and sound-based works focus on questions of society, ecology, and feminism. She is a co-founder of the Budapest-based xtro realm artist group whose work addresses non-anthropocentric and ecological strands of thought since 2017. She is editor and co-author of extrodæsia: Encyclopedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World (2019), a Hungarian-English bilingual dictionary that collects the vocabulary of the Anthropocene in dialogue with poetry and visual artworks. She is also co-editor of the artist group’s Climate Imaginary Reader published in 2020 as the 9th special issue of  Mezosfera magazine. https://annazilahi.com