Katalin Ladik

Katalin Ladik (born 1942, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) is a poet, visual artist and actress. Her visual and sound poetry, performances and body art are based on the intermedial reinterpretation of body and language, sound and visuality. From around 1960-62, the very beginning of Ladik’s 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. A major aspect of her work is feminism: from her earliest performances she used her own body as a medium – equivalent to text and sound, creating multi-identities of different sexes and personalities on stage. The use of clothing patterns on her collage-verses also critically highlight the traditional women’s roles. Besides her performances and visual works, Ladik’s production in radio, theatre and movies has been extensive, as have her recordings of music and sound poetry. After 1976 she became an important figure in the scene of international sound poetry. Since the late 1970s she has been a participant of several international exhibitions, her works were recently featured at documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017), at Shedhalle Zurich (2018) and at IVAM Valencia (2019) among others. A retrospective exhibition of Katalin Ladik was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vojvodina (Novi Sad, Serbia, 2011). Her works can be found in the collections of the Tate, the MoMA in New York, and the MACBA in Barcelona among others.