Pathos and/or Criticism? The Political and Artistic Instrumentalisation of the Female Body

The beauty queen election was intertwined with a cigarette advertising business involving Austrian and German companies, as well as unclear legal issues, nude photos of beauty queen candidates sold to Western European erotic magazines and a likewise disrobed sculpture of Csilla Molnár. 

In other words, in Hungary, the first “product” to be marketed with state backing in the period before the regime change was the female body, not independently of the objectives of party politics. In her lecture, Ágnes Eperjesi discusses the ways in which the transformation of mass culture, triggered by the period’s changing regulations in Hungary, became embedded in visual arts.

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Photo: András Dér, 1987.