Rokko Juhász (1963, Slovakia) is based in Budapest, Hungary and is the Director of Transart Communication Performance Art Festival. He has been practicing as a performance artist, poet and organizer for the past 30 years participating in global performance art events from 1988. To name a few, Birth of Light, Parabiosis in China, There is not just one truth in IAGO, Mexico, A Brief History of the Universe, Espacio & Presencia in Lima, Peru, Soft White Table in Venezia, Italy and Helmut, Demolice in Prague, Czech Republic are some of his mentionable performances.
He realized hundreds of performances and published six books of experimental poetry. Between 1987–2007 he was the leader of Studio erté, an International Multimedia Art Organizing Company that he co-founded in Nové Zámky with the purpose to support performance and multimedia art. He focuses on performance art in public spaces, long durational performances and performance art projects.
Three ways to do visual art performance
Work title: The competition
Duration: 30 minutes
The competition is participatory performance in collaboration with five local rickshaw drivers and five international performance artists. I asked five rickshaw drivers and colleges to participate in cycle-rickshaw competition in an athletic stadium. I changed the roles and ask rickshaw drivers to sit in their vehicles instead of driving them. International performance artist drove them around the running path. The exchange of roles showed how this easy-looking activity can become a nightmare for people who are not accustomed to driving a rickshaw.
Work title: Dreaming about the water in Blue
Duration: 30 minutes.
Since 1996 I have realized plenty of performances called paranormal sport activity. This site-specific performance installation becomes a part of this series. In a blue painted swimming pool area I find six blue curtains, six big wall-clocks and six sun beds. I prepared installation along the pool where there were six blue painted barred places and chose six people from the audience to lie down on the blue sunbeds.
I asked them to wear the dust-masks to evoke dryness and lack of water. Behind every sunbed I set up blue curtain and wall-clock to evoke a time flow and to have a feeling of competition. I Asked audience standing front of this installation to start the countdown of 30 minutes.
I started to carry dry sand to the middle of this installation and changed my suit to swimming dress. I lied down, put my head to the sand heap and started to swim on the bank of the pool. During 30 minute swimming sand slowly covered my head.
With creation of this site-specific performance installation I created strong images that would inspire the audience to think about the role of water in our life and the same time about the dust pollution.
Work title: Recycled Art performance.
Duration: 3 hours
This site-specific long durational performance took place in a courtyard where I found plenty of abandoned stone-busts covered with lush vegetation, partially destroyed by time and weather. There were at least 100 real size busts. Some of it was busts were of well-known philosophers, some of young ladies’ or of old man’s busts, a result of art practices. In context of society or time it can be timestamps of abandoned or lost civilizations. In my long durational performance I started to rescue busts from the lush vegetation, cleaned and washed them piece by piece. Later I made a new heap with these artifacts piece by piece and slightly changed the context of busts, giving them back to Time and decay.
