Katalin Ladik: Ooooooooo-pus

Katalin Ladik is pioneering figure in Central and Eastern European art histories, merging performance, (visual) poetry, photography, and installation in a practice that spans over six decades. Her practice is intertwined with the art histories of Novi Sad in former Yugoslavia - where she was a key protagonist among a generation of avant-garde artists and writers in the 1960s - and Budapest, her adopted home since the mid-1970s.

The catalogue for the exhibition Ooooooooo-pus, organized at Muzeum Susch in 2022/2023, contextualizes Ladik's wide-ranging practice within post-war international discourses on (lens-based) performance, concrete and visual poetry, scoreand instruction-based work, feminist histories, as well as the presence of ritual and folklore in recent art. Authors such as Diedrich Diederichsen (theorist and critic, Berlin), Hendrik Folkerts (Curator of International Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), Irena Haiduk (artist, Belgrade and New York), Ana Janevski (Curator of Media and Performance, Museum of Moderna Art, New York), and Dieter Roelstraete (writer and curator, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago) will contribute longer-form essays, while various experts including Emese Kürti (art historian and critic, Budapest), Bhavisha Panchia (cura tor and writer, Johannesburg), Gloria Sutton (Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History, Northeastern University, Boston), Paolo Thorsen-Nagel (musician and artist, Berlin), and Mónica de la Torre (poet, New York) will discuss a single work from Ladik's practice.