Katalin Ladik is a Hungarian artist whose practice is centred around sonic and visual poetry and performance. The exhibition “OOOOOOOOO-PUS” shows a variety of Ladiks work throughout her career, the audience is invited to speak the title out loud, saying each “O” individually followed by the “PUS”, noting how this makes there body feel.

The exhibition included definitions of words such as score, poem, and mythology on placards around the gallery, helping the audience to understand these terms more abstractly and accesibly. Ladik uses what she calls “visual poems” as scores, similar to a graphic score, the visual poems inform her creation of sounds. The visual poems are made by collaging found material together, this material includes news paper cut outs, sewing patterns, sheet music, photographs, and domestic circuit parts. The combination of these materials can be linked to themes of female labour, national identity, and folklore. The visual poems and their sonic accompaniments reconsider how language is used and interpreted; they are both abstract and obvious.

“Die Frauen”, (1978)

The feminine voice goes from a sound that reminds me of laughing to a more nonsensual sound to a pain fueled sob sound. I don’t really know what these sounds are, I don’t think I’m meant to, all I do know is the sound and its affect changes significantly throughout this piece from sweet to sinister.

“Frauen” translates from German to English to mean “womenfolk”; perhaps this work is in reference to gender based violence.

“Screaming Hole”, (1979)

“Standing in a wooden structure covered with posters and surrounded by objects associated with feminine labour, Ladik performed some of the gestures and motifs of her photo-performance Poemim as well as the “anti-striptease” performance Blackshave Poem. The audience would only hear and smell Ladik’s actions and had to poke holes into the paper to see the performance.” (Exhibition placard), photo documentation of this performance could be seen in the exhibition through a small circular peephole, the exhibition audience then has a similar experience of the work to the live performance audience.

“Poemim” (1976/2016)

Works such as Ladik’s portrait series “Poemim” (1976/2016) play with gender conventions through there contradictions. The presentation of self is confined to neither to male or female expressions of gender. Windowpanes are used to play with public and private, as well as distortion of the body, revealing the grotesque.

Ladik’s body becomes the communicator in Poemim, the way the body silently communicates in these photo-performances has brought me back to consider a qoute from my essay bibliography; “the body-made-text does not need to speak to the public in order to use its own voice: the artist’s body becomes in fact readable because, despite its silence, it shows itself as a living archive of traumatic memory.” (Casalini, 2013, 39), as this body of work is photographic, it is inherently silent, yet the gestures, to me, suggest an audible history, speaking to the politicisation of gender and identity in 1970s Hungary.

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Ladiks practice has inspired me to make connections between the audio and visual within my own practice, I feel intrigued to play with graphic scores that could inform performance as well as sound making.

Painted graphic score one:

Painted graphic score two:

I will be using these scores when recording the voice and when composing with the recordings.

References: FEMINIST EMBODIMENTS OF SILENCE. PERFORMING THE INTOLERABLE SPEECH IN THE WORK OF REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO – Giulia Casalini 2013