Kata Krasznahorkai is a Berlin-based art historian and curator working as a researcher at the University of Zürich in the ERC-research project Performance Art in Eastern Europe (1950-1990). History and Theory. Krasznahorkai studied art history in Budapest, Berlin, Vienna and Hamburg and defended her PhD 2015 at the University of Hamburg on “Walter De Maria´s Lightning Field between image and technical history“. She was a curator at the Ludwig Museum Budapest (1996-2003) and the project director at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (2010-2016). She was the curator of the 3-years- project series “Critique and Crisis. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité reconsidered” in cooperation with the Council of Europe and the German Historical Museum Berlin and she launched a performance program. Krasznahorkai is also an expert for the rescaling of the Council of Europe`s art exhibitions and the chairwomen of the Berlin-based organisation “Critique&Culture”.
Krasznahorkai published and lectured extensively on performance art and state security, e.g.
”Wie Spitzel unser Wissen über Kunst vermehren” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(2012); “Heightened Alert: The Underground Art Scene in the Sights of the Secret Police“ in:
Art Beyond Borders: artistic exchange in communist Europe 1945-1990 (2015); Tamas
St.Auby`s Strike, in: Work, MIT: Whitechapel Documents of Contemporray Art (2017).
Her forthcoming publication „Surveilling the Public Sphere.
The First Hungarian Happening in Secret Agents Reports" will be published in Performance in the Second Public Sphere, Routledge, 2018 and „Happening vor Gericht. Das Nalaja-Happening und die subversiven Operationspraktiken der Staatssicherheit im Ungarn der 1960er und 1970er Jahre“ in: Kunst und Literatur vor Gericht, Matthes&Seitz, 2018. Her monograph „Die Spitze der Blitze. Walter De Maria`s Lightning Field zwischen Bild- und Technikgeschichte“ is in print at edition metzel, München.
