Katalin Ladik: Ooooooooo-pus

“If we are the most vulnerable in our poetry, we shall pour our whole bodies into it.” —Katalin Ladik

We invite you to say the exhibition title out loud: repeating the letter “o” nine times, rounding your lips and vibrating your vocal cords, making a short pause for the dash, and then expelling the gentle push of “pus”. You have now entered the world of Katalin Ladik, whose radical approach to concrete and visual poetry, sound, performance, and sculpture 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 demographic composition of Novi Sad—being majority Serbian and Hungarian—shaped the artist’s visual approach to language and poetry. Moreover, in her performances, Ladik engaged the folkloric and nationalistic discourses prevalent in that region with great irony and piercing critique. In the 1960s, Ladik became an integral part of the Novi Sad literary and artistic avant-garde. Over the course of the 1970s, Ladik increasingly turned to visual art and merged her poetry with her experimental sound practice, positioning herself at the intersection of various established and new performance traditions, from radio play, theater and film, to happenings, rituals, photo-performance, and television.

The first part of the exhibition Katalin Ladik: Ooooooooo-pus is dedicated to language, which is at the heart of Ladik’s practice. Her expansive attitude to poetry materializes on the pages of her books, in musical scores, through concrete poems, and visual collages, as well as a newly commissioned sculptural score entitled Matilda’s Dream (2023). Almost all of these works are accompanied by sonic interpretations that show the artist’s extraordinary vocal range. All these works speak to Ladik’s process of logopoiesis: to bring into existence new registers of language through acts of poetry, utterance, and visualization. Or, to follow the title of her 1976 album Phonopoetica, a process of understanding poetry through the voice.

These sonic iterations of Ladik’s poetry exemplify her unique performance vocabulary, highlighted in the second part of the exhibition, which occupies the intersection of experimental sound practice, theatre, happenings, and photo-performance. A clear feminist position emerges, as Ladik provocatively challenged established traditions and gender roles by embodying their inherent contradictions.

In the third and last part, the exhibition foregrounds how Ladik’s multifaceted practice is imbued with folkloric and mythological motifs, and the creation of new origin stories around the major subjects in her work: language, national identity, gender, femininity, the body, and technology. Two key works in this section are Ladik’s new installation work Alice (2023), based on her multimedia performance series Alice in Codeland, and the monumental textile installation Follow me Into Mythology (2017), emerging from the live performance Ladik staged at documenta 14 in Athens.

Sound is the connective tissue binding Ladik’s multifaceted work and this exhibition. Each gallery has its own soundscape based on the artist’s visual and sonic poetry, making “Ooooooooo-pus” an exhibition that needs to be heard as much as seen. Ladik will also perform live both in the exhibition and in collaboration with the composer Svetlana Maraš, as part of Haus der Kunst’s TUNE program on July 14 and July 15, 2023.

The exhibition at Haus der Kunst München is co-curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer (Haus der Kunst München) and Hendrik Folkerts (Moderna Museet, Stockholm), in close collaboration with the artist. The exhibition Katalin Ladik: Ooooooooo-pus is co-organized by Haus der Kunst München, Ludwig Forum Aachen, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Publication
A monograph published by Skira Editore, Milan, will accompany the exhibition. The publication comprises contributions by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hendrik Folkerts, Irena Haiduk, Ana Janevski, Emese Kürti, Katalin Ladik, Quinn Latimer, Bhavisha Panchia, Dieter Roelstraete, Gloria Sutton, Sarah Johanna Theurer, Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, und Mónica de la Torre. The publication is co-produced by Haus der Kunst München, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Ludwig Forum Aachen, and Muzeum Susch, with support from acb gallery, Budapest.

Performances
July 14: TUNE Katalin Ladik live in the exhibition
July 15: TUNE Katalin Ladik and Svetlana Maraš