Art Basel 2023

acb Gallery | Feature sector | booth D12

Body as a voice, image as a sound in Katalin Ladik’s practice 

A radical woman performer active in the Yugoslav as well as the Hungarian Neo-avant-garde, Katalin Ladik’s work is perhaps the greatest rediscovery of recent years. Her visual and sound poetry, performances and body art are based on the intermediatic reinterpretation of body and language, sound and visuality. acb’s selection for Art Basel focuses on this interaction of genres, with an emphasis on early collages, music scores and photo performances which are underlining the relevance of the use of voice and sound from the late 1960s and 1970s. In Ladik’s practice, each medium used, departs from, and goes back to sound. Collages are conceived as musical scores, visual poetry as letters or texts to be vocalised, while performances position the artist’s body as not only the siege of the voice, but also the channel through which it can express itself. In her performances, the artist has been using her body as a tool to voice social expectations, beauty standards, the condition of the artist as a woman in a highly patriarchal system and therefore, the high degree of politicisation of the female body as a biological, social entity (and national property). 

Katalin Ladik (born Újvidék, 1942) is a Hungarian poet, performance artist and actress. She was born in Újvidék, Kingdom of Hungary (today Novi Sad, Serbia), and in the last 20 years she has lived and worked alternately in Novi Sad, in Budapest, Hungary and on the island of Hvar, Croatia. Parallel to her written poems she also creates sound poems and visual poems, performance art, writes and performs experimental music and audio plays. She is also a performer and an experimental artist (happenings, mail art, experimental theatrical plays). She explores language through visual and vocal expressions, as well as movement and gestures. Her work includes collages, photography, records, performances and happenings in both urban and natural environments.

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