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Zsuzsanna Ardó is Hungarian by birth, European by existence, human by
inclination, humorous by nature—and a visual artist, curator, writer,
journalist, translator, editor by profession. A voting member of the British
Film Academy (also of the special BAFTA Chapters on Documentary, Films Not in
the English Language, and Writing) and the British Association of Journalists
for many years, she founded and has been running Creatives without Borders for over a decade, to
investigate contemporary culture critically and creatively. She has curated many installations
and exhibitions, and has served as portfolio reviewer, mentor/speaker and jury
chair of various art competitions internationally. Travelling across Europe,
from the Black Sea to the Danube Delta, she has worked as expert on board to
give talks about culture, photography, art and cultural history, and
photographing the Danube and the cultures along the way. Women of Light | Women
of Shadow, is one of her ongoing visual/textual investigations of cultures in
flux, identities on the periphery and the immigrant/migrant experience. Her work
on Immigrant Identities was awarded the Deutsche
Börse Award Artist in Residence at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.
Forthcoming projects include an international group show featuring her mixed media collage East River Esplanade at the United Nations HQ in Manhattan NY, fieldwork of women in Afghanistan, and Here There, Now Then, her Heath and Thames Valley arts project selected for an artist/scientist expedition to the Arctic.
Throughout September to December 2012, her large-scale glass installation with public engagement about interacting with memory – Tears, Apples and Stones – was featured at the Contemporary Art Centre in the Samorin Synagogue in Slovakia, and discussed in the press. The installation includes music by Daniel Andor-Ardó and Jonathan David, two composers from the C4 Ensemble, New York. Her creative collaboration with the C4 Ensemble in New York continues in February and March with the world premier of the choral composition based on her poem: Pitter Patter, Pitter Patter… and Then. This poem is also performed in May at the Galapagos Arts Space and at the 21st Project in New York.
The Stars Touch the Sand: My Journey with Beduins in the Sinai Desert, her large-scale photography installation, was featured in February at Queen's College in Harley Street, London.
After the launch at the Brooklyn Arts Library in New York in March, East River Sizzle, her one-off artist book of paintings about the East River in Manhattan went on tour in Canada and the US, including Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The First Human Rights Conference in Support of Cultures in Iran hosted her European Roma photography and invited her to discuss her art practice with young Iranians.
As Artist in Residence at the Digital Art Centre in Spain, she collaborated on digital art and on a multimedia interactive feature with soundscape, based on her short story and photographs, published by Arts and Cultures in openDemocracy. Her photograph, “Shifting Sand of History on the Wall” was featured in their Photo of the Week series. Her work is in private and public collections and has been published internationally. As a visual artist, she has been invited to painting, mixed media and photography artist-in-residencies internationally.
She has had exhibitions in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Iran, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the US, including the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts Delhi, Amnesty International, Europe House, the British Film Academy and the Royal Institution, the European Commission, and the Pompidou Centre. Her recent paintings and installations featured in galleries include La Dolce Vita in Italy, Chronos and Kairos in Germany, and Earth, Bleeding in Austria.
She runs Creatives without Borders, aka known formerly as the Hampstead Authors Society, and edits HASNotes. Her books and articles have been published in various languages, in the UK, US, Hungary, Germany, Russia and Singapore. She has worked as an academic, journalist, editor, and broadcaster; she has translated and edited over 100 feature films, from James Bond to Shakespeare. Her broadcasting experience includes European-wide satellite television series on intercultural communication and management. Her play, The Hat: Arendt Meets Heidegger premiered at Harvard and she wrote and directed her short film Allegro Barbaro, a triple-flashback visual poem to music. Culture Shock! Hungary, her social anthropology-cum-travel book, is in its third, expanded edition worldwide, illustrated by her photos. How to be a European: Go Hungarian, and Love Blues: Hungarian Rhapsodies are cultural satires on Hungarians, published with her English and Hungarian parallel texts.