MUNICH.- Haus der Kunst München is presenting “Ooooooooo-pus”, the first survey exhibition in Germany of the work of Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Novi Sad). Her radical approach to concrete and visual poetry, performance, and sound established her as a key figure in Central and Eastern European art. Ladik was born in 1942 in Novi Sad, a city in former Yugoslavia (now Serbia) that has long been a conduit between the Balkans and parts of Central and Eastern Europe. The multilingual demographics of Novi Sad – being majority Serbian and Hungarian – shaped Ladik’s visual approach to language and poetry.
Over the course of the 1960s, Ladik became an integral part of the Novi Sad literary and artistic avant-garde. She positioned herself at the intersection of various established and new performance traditions engaging in happenings, rituals, and photo-performance. Ladik, who was also successful as a film and stage actress, often played feminine ideals, draws on folkloric and mythological themes to challenge gender roles and female archetypes, using her body and voice as both instrument and medium.
For Ladik, the body engenders poetry. It is a site of self-representation that she has consistently explored in her performances from the 1960s onward. Her visual poems – collages that include sewing patterns, sheet music, and found objects such as circuit boards from radios and kitchen appliances – function also as musical scores. They explore connections between the voice and image while expanding language through phonetic experiments. The exhibition includes two new works commissioned for the occasion: a sculptural score with corresponding sound and an installation that derives from Ladik’s multimedia performance Alice in Codeland.
Language is at the heart of Katalin Ladik’s practice. Her expansive approach to poetry materialises on the pages of her books, in her musical scores, and through concrete poems and visual collages. The latter are accompanied by sonic interpretations that show the artist’s extraordinary vocal range. All of these works speak to Ladik’s process of logopoiesis: the bringing into existence of new registers of language through acts of poetry, utterance, and visualisation. Or, to borrow the title of her 1976 album, a process of Phonopoetica, making poetry with voice.
In the exhibition, a red thread leads from Ladik’s sewing machine in the first room through the entire exhibition to her sculpture Follow me into Mythology (2017). Another conduit is the sound, which is central to Haus der Kunst’s 2023 programme, and which forms the connective tissue of Ladik’s multifaceted oeuvre. Each of the exhibition’s three rooms has its own soundscape based on Ladik’s visual and phonic poetry, making “Ooooooooo-pus” an exhibition that needs to be heard as much as to be seen. Followed by “Meredith Monk: Calling”, this exhibition presents a new exhibition model at Haus der Kunst for displaying ground-breaking practices based on the audible.
