Katalin Ladik

With her groundbreaking, genre-fluid work, the Hungarian-Serbian poet, performer, sound, photo, and conceptual artist Katalin Ladik (b. 1942 in Novi Sad) is regarded as a trailblazer of the feminist avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe. Since the early 1960s, she has used her body and her own voice as mediums for visual poetry and sound compositions that are propelled by subversive, post-surreal humor and the pursuit of artistic autonomy. Collages and multilingual poetry are the scores of her expanded concept of art, which continues to fuel her radically experimental aesthetic praxis to this day. Ladik, whose range as an artist includes being active as a film and theater actress, as well as a band member, is represented in major collections around the world. In 2016, she received the LennonOno Grant for Peace awarded by Yoko Ono, together with Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, and Ólafur Elíasson. In 2017, she participated in documenta 14 in Athens/Kassel. Her first comprehensive retrospective in Germany was held in 2023 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. According to Marta Dziewańska in the Daybook accompanying documenta 14, her entire art production is 'in constant flux and transformation': 'She endlessly reinvents her language(s).'