Ovartaci

Ovartaci was a colorful and complex person – self‑taught artist, poet, and engineer. An adventurer and a dreamer. Intellectual, psychiatric patient, and trained house painter.

She was a winter bather, a yogi, and a lover of nature. She believed in Buddhism, animism, and reincarnation, drawing inspiration from the many past lives she felt she had lived.

Her life’s work is inseparable from her own radical life story, which also includes a nervous breakdown in Argentina, a self-performed gender amputation, and an unfulfilled dream of living life as a woman. Altogether, she lived for 56 years as a patient at psychiatric hospitals, primarily in Risskov, north of Aarhus.