After more than two years of touring at three major European contemporary art institutions, Katalin Ladik’s works are finally back to Budapest for an exhibition celebrating the artist’s international success. Entitled Matilda’s Dream, Katalin Ladik’s newest show at acb Gallery premieres in Hungary the eponymous installation and accompanying sound piece, along with other works commissioned by Haus der Kunst in Munich, the first venue of her touring exhibition Ooooooo-pus. It also features a selection of artworks exploring the topics of the subconscious, dreams, magic, secret and ambivalence, in a variety of media ranging from video to objects and from textile to photography.

The exhibition welcomes the visitor with a selection of pieces from Katalin Ladik’s visual essay, conceived for the exhibition catalogue of the travelling exhibition. The digital collages augmented with English and Hungarian texts explore the fertile transition between one dream to another, but also the thin line that divides dream and reality.

The main space of the exhibition presents works inhabiting both the archaic ritual realm and the modern technological territory, ranging from spectacular objects made of molten lead, to integrated circuit that the artist interprets as musical scores. As a folkloric tradition linked to Hungary and the Balkans and performed at Christmas or New Year’s Eve, lead pouring is a ritual performed to predict the future, especially for young women in order to presage characteristics of their future husband. For this technique of divination called molybdomancy, molten lead is poured into water in order to solidify quickly into different forms and shapes. In the piece Sonnet of the Lead, Katalin intertwined this ancient tradition with poetry in order to compose lines that imitate shining metal. As for integrated circuits, Katalin Ladik sourced them in household or kitchen devices such as hotplates or irons, typically used by women. These circuits bear a graphical potential that the artist interprets as musical scores, and are shown together with their interpreted vocal content. In both cases, the “reading” of these elements is not obvious, and encloses a secret, hidden meaning, that the artist has been drawn to throughout her career.

The photographs featured in the main space are related to the topic of androgyny, that encapsulates the dichotomy that is fundamental to Katalin Ladik’s practice. In the series Androgyn, the artist’s horizontally mirrored face and bust references the metaphor of descent to, and ascent from the underworld, that has been serving as a basis for all her performances and that acts as a symbol of the process of creation. In her performance entitled Mandora –a play on words between Man and Pandora – the motif of androgyny also represents the permeability between the sexes, the blurring of boundaries between genders, and their possible merging.

When asked about her relationship to multiple identities, the artist elaborated as follows:

“The foundation of these expressions is also poetry. Thinking in terms of poetry, in terms of language. Hungarian is not suited to distinguish feminine from masculine of neutral gender. Nonetheless, I made an effort sometimes to express the anima-animus and neutrality in writing and in performance, it was a transmigration from genders. This transition is becoming a man from a woman, viewing the world from a man’s point of view.

And then there is the myth of androgyny. The androgynous motif has a very important role in my life, in my performances as well as my poetry: how a poet and a performer feels in a female role and in a male

role. […] Sometimes I put a Janus mask, so I had a face in the front and the back; I was bigender and androgynous. I’ve always been intrigued by the duality between the two genders.”

Finally, the work that connects every part of the exhibition, Matilda’s Dream, also appears as a secret message to be deciphered. The metal bed frame combined with chicken net carries a motif formed with a vermilion cotton yarn that extends in space like the net of dreams, linking images and forms in a surrealistic, instinctive, smooth or chaotic way, reminding us that no interpretation is straightforward and that true meanings are often hidden.