Dorottya Poór (HU)

Dorottya Poór is a Budapest-based visual artist, cartoonist and art educator. She works with storytelling between documentary and fiction, merging fictional elements, observations of everyday life, and feminist theory in her drawing, comics, and participatory practices.

Her latest project, the Witches series, is a collection of short comics on everyday witches, sisterhood, and magical thinking, presented as riso-printed books and large-scale textile installations. Built around brief encounters of characters from different backgrounds, it gives a candid documentation of contemporary women’s lives in Central and Eastern Europe. The Witch serves as a narrative device that connects various topics such as care work, old age and the oppression of women in our contemporary neoliberal patriarchy. The stories are influenced by Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, a book that describes witch hunts as the instrument of body politics, the means of controlling the female body and gaining reproductive control necessary for the building of capitalism. In our current time of women’s rights setbacks and population control policies, it’s relevant to ask, who would be the witches nowadays? The witches of these books lead a silent resistance by small acts of care and solidarity.

Sisterhood, community and care play a central role not only in her stories but also in her work as an activist, art educator and facilitator of participatory art projects. In 2023, she worked on the Orczy Neighbourhood Project, using creative tools to build community, fight gentrification and research the local history of a stigmatised area in Budapest, Hungary, as an awardee of the Bertha Foundation Artivist Award, alongside a group of community developers, social workers, sociologists, cultural workers, and artists. Between 2017 and 2024, she has been a regular collaborator of Pneuma org. artist network, co-creating postdramatic performances, community and public art projects. She is running experimental drawing classes for adults on all levels, focusing on drawing as a tool of empowerment.

The residency of Dorottya Poór is supported by the International Visegrad Fund.