Katailn Ladik: The Voice of A Woman

Katalin Ladik was a radical woman performer active in the Yugoslav and Hungarian avant-garde scenes from the 1960s-1980s. An exhibition at acb Gallery and acb NA Gallery presents a retrospective of her visual and sound poetry, performances, and body art which reinterpreted the body and language. As one of the first women performers in Yugoslavia to use her own body as a medium, Ladik's work questioned traditional female roles and enriched avant-garde discourse with a feminist perspective. The exhibitions feature photographic documents of Ladik's performances as well as her typical intermedial genre combining actionism and music.

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Katailn Ladik: The Voice of A Woman

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acb Gallery, Budapest, VI. Kirly u. 76. / acb Attachment, Budapest, VI. Etvs u. 2.

/ acb NA, Budapest, Kirly u. 74.

Katailn Ladik: The Voice of a Woman

Vernissage: Thursday, 28 April 2016, 19:00-21:00
On view: 29 April 2 June 2016
A radical woman performer active in the Yugoslav as well as the Hungarian avant-garde, Katalin Ladik
is perhaps the greatest rediscovery of recent years. Her visual and sound poetry, performances and
body art are based on the intermedial reinterpretation of body and language, sound and visuality. A
retrospective selection of Katalin Ladiks art is now presented by acb Gallery in two venues.
Katalin Ladik started her career as a poet and through the publication of her poetry in the second half
of the sixties, she got in touch with the circle around j Symposion, the only Hungarian language
avant-garde journal of Vojvodina. Serving as a space for avant-garde discourse, the intellectual
environment of the journal had a catalytic role in the literary and artistic progress of the period.
From around 1960-62, the very beginning of Ladiks career, a fundamental aspect of her poems was
their chantability, and by the end of the sixties, phonic poetry and performance had unequivocally
become her most important genres. Katalin Ladik was the first woman performer in Yugoslavia to use
her own body in performances as an autonomous medium equivalent to text and sound. Her famous
bagpipe performance in 1970 was not merely a major moment in Eastern European actionism and a
scandalous event in the stiffening Yugoslav political atmosphere, but it also set irreversible processes
in motion in the history of the emancipation of not just the Yugoslav, but, as relations between the
two scenes had intensified, also the Hungarian avant-garde.
From the seventies, a central element in Katalin Ladiks performances was reflection on the womans
role. Sometimes almost completely naked, other times concealed by costumes, masks and props, her
body and the ritual series of actions carried out by it, or the elements referring to sewing and
tailoring in her collages used as scores for her vocal performances, all questioned several aspects of
the traditional female roles constructed by the male-dominated society. Ladiks feminist approach
enriched the avant-garde discourse with a radically new position not only in Yugoslavia, but owing
to her regular performances and the unofficial network of avant-garde art in Hungary as well.
The exhibition The Voice of a Woman presents a selection of the still active artists creative period
spanning from the late sixties until the mid-eighties. Disjointed yet not disassociated, the two
exhibitions in the spaces of the acb Gallery and the NA Gallery focus on different media in Katalin
Ladiks art. The exhibition in acb Gallery introduces Ladiks emblematic performances and body art
pieces primarily in the form of photographic documents, from her early surrealistic-erotic
performances through the Poemim series to her also poetically inclined Mandora performance from
1985. NA Gallery presents a representative selection of the music scores, her typical intermedial
genre which is a hybrid of actionism and music, as well as her reinterpreted collages referring back to
the classical avant-garde. The two spaces are linked by an experimental film made by Katalin Ladik
and Bogdanka Poznanovi in 1980, a motivic summary of the unified conception of sound poetry and
visual art.