ARTIST STATEMENT

>>{ Life is Circus }<< 
Once I was told that I create Operas of the Everyday.
>> jó ebédhez szól a nóta <<

I’m building a virtual reality Social Housing Neighborhood called Szívküldi Lakótelep, (szívküldi= heart-sent, lakótelep=social housing neighborhood) considering the possibilities and dangers of ‘home’ in cyber-space.
I gather Friends to create a nook-like Safe Space built of memories for our grandchildren. I use the patterns of my upbringing
being flown on large kites and growing up in a comfort flat
on the 8th floor in the late communist era of Hungary.
 
Weaving together my free-flow drawings, the Long Distance
Somersault practice (LDS) and my treasures (#memoryconnector),
I aim to provide platform for a discourse and help to build “protector shelters” that respond to the rapidly increasing ambiguity  
between our digital and analog worlds.
How do we distinguish between the layers of reality, human consciousness and other forms of intelligence in the fickle realms of identities, data and materiality?
 
Drawing upon ideas of Hito Steyerl, Alan Warburton, or Jaron Lanier as well as my personal experience of constant migration, I’m wondering about the human condition in our achievement society when travel and communication are faster than ever, yet we have no time to learn basic survival skills or connect; generations are so separated that new kinds of communities emerge and fall apart with the speed of internet memes. How do we activate our seeds and what do we grow from this transnational, global, liquid self-enslavement?
What are the boundaries of entropy and integrity / value?
What does HOME mean and when does it become an institution?
Poor Homes have no Hats.
WE are the hats - the Garbage and the Treasure.
 
>>{cycles <> endless loop}<<
Long Distance Somersault (LDS) career maintains my flexibility to roll further and reflects on my social and spatial encounters. I use my body as a device to sharpen consciousness, and it’s a crucial balance of my digital practice.
 
>>{Fast Forward Speranza1}<<
Being sponsored allows me to examine the effects of monetary involvement and validates my suspicion that everything is possible.
LDS is my meditation on the hamster wheel of life that helps to
gaze into the Eye of the Hurricane. In a group practice, social connections and relations can be exercised through this different awareness.
 
>> SAFEISSCARY2 <<
Understanding more about the era of beginnings of AI makes me respect the values of unexpected patterns even more; I embrace futile, nonsense activities and the freedom of the realms of in-between, being lost, slippage, glossolalia.
The importance of artists now could be as crucial as a midwife at birth.
I’m looking for alternatives to code the love that I’m built of
with a soft feminine nesting approach,
in contrast of the cynical honesty of Jon Rafman or Jacolby Satterwhite.
 
>>A rolling moss gathers no stones <<
I inhabit self-created careers to amplify the nature of constant change.
Professionalism and seriousness often lead to rigid, selfish ego plays.
Playing with these occupations is a binding agent for exploring different materials (childhood drawing tools, VR video, performance etc.), styles and topics; for example being a mind cartographer,
a tear factory worker, a poop fortune-teller and so.
As of now, I’m aiming towards being a Cleaning Lady and the Good Grandmother – cleaning up and recycling love without
the attachments and proximities of maternity.
 
>> Naïve to the bone <<
 
 
1 Speranza (Hope) is the island where Robinson arrives in Michael Tournier’s Friday, or, The Other Island
2 Banu Cennetoğlu BEINGSAFEISSCARY 2017, various materials, Friedrichsplatz, Kassel, documenta 14

BIOGRAPHY

Judit Navratil’s practice is multivalent, engaging performance, social practices, drawing, as well as video and VR. The relationship between the real and virtual is personally significant to Judit, as she has moved between several different countries and cultures in her lifetime, and relies on digital means to connect to people and places in an attempt to construct “home.” Her projects are as much affective mappings of what it means to continuously oscillate between analog and digital, past and present. Navratil uses her body-device to keep balance through her compass-meditation: the Long Distance Somersault career. Rolling as far as she can helps her seeking higher alternatives and to gaze in the Eye of the Hurricane.

Navratil earned an MFA in Painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2008 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2019. She has been exhibiting in Hungary, Canada, France, Korea and the Bay Area. Her work has been recognized through awards and residencies including the Cadogan Art Award, a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), the Dennis Leon and Christin Nelson Scholarship and a Presidential Scholarship for Anderson Ranch. She is currently an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.