STOCKHOLM.- Katalin Ladik is a pioneer in experimental poetry, sound and performance art. Referred to as the Yoko Ono of the Balkans, Ladik places language at the heart of her practice. Since the 1960s, she has used her body as both medium and material. “Ooooooooo-pus” is Katalin Ladik’s first survey exhibition in Scandinavia with around a hundred works from her sixty-year-long career.

Katalin Ladik was born in 1942 in the city of Novi Sad, in former Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and currently lives in Budapest, Hungary. Her practice has been shaped by the multicultural and multilingual context of Novi Sad, where the majority of the population is Serbian or Hungarian. She began her career as a poet and was one of the few women in the city’s artistic and literary avant-garde.

– First, and above all, I am a poet. I constantly try to expand the boundaries of poetry. Whatever material I use in my work, I always convey a poetic message through it; voice poetry with my voice, concrete poetry with my visual works and collages, and multimedia poetic performances with my body. *

Visual poems

“Ooooooooo-pus” is an exhibition where visitors get to listen as much as look. Each of the three galleries in the exhibition has its own soundscape – a soundtrack – from the artist’s sound poetry. The first part of the exhibition presents Katalin Ladik’s work on language, through her “visual poems”. She creates collages using a variety of found materials, from sewing patterns and sheet music to found object, such as circuit cards from radios and kitchen appliances. With her extraordinary vocal range, she then interprets the collages like a music score.

Folklore and mythology

The second part of the exhibition highlights Katalin Ladik’s religious, folkloric and mythological themes. She often makes use of well-known female characters in mythology, for instance in the installation “Follow me into Mythology” (2017), which consists of a sixty-metres-long embroidered textile ribbon that invites us to follow the red thread of Cretan princess Ariadne.

Challenging established traditions

Katalin Ladik’s visual poems are also the key to her performance art, which is presented in the third and final part of the exhibition. A clear feminist position emerges here: ever since the early 1970s, she has challenged established traditions and gender roles by embodying their contradictions. She appears both male and female or androgynous, covered and exposed, inviting and repelling, playful and severe.

*Katalin Ladik in an interview from 2020