Katalin Ladik was born 1942 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and is currently based in Budapest, Hungary where she has lived and worked since the 1990s.
Her artistic output is at once sprawling, prolific and singular. Beginning as a poet and expanding into performances in the 1970s she developed her own theatrical language which eventually came to incorporate sound and visual poetry, performance art, experimental music, audio plays, happenings, mail art, collage, and photography.
Throughout Ladik's work and particularly in her performances, the voice and the body (most often her own) converge to become a site in which the personal and political spheres overlap. Making use of diverse sources from mythic narratives to personal and everyday objects, she has consistently sought to investigate her role as a woman in her own Eastern European context, challenging dominant societal, sexual and gender norms.
She began her career with interventions on Radio Novi Sad (1963–77) and as an actress with the avant-garde theatre group Bosch+Bosch in the city of Subotica (1977–92). However, it was the publication of the record Phonopetica (1976) which drew the attention of sound poets abroad including Bob Cobbing, Gerhard Rühm and Henry Chopin who invited her to perform the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1977, and led to her international recognition and prominence within the fields of sound poetry and visual art in which she remains active today.
Most recently she participated in documenta 14 in Athens, and last year the Italian label Alga Margen released Phonopoetics, a diverse survey of Ladik's audio work between 1968-1963.
"Poet, actress, and visual artist Katalin Ladik has to be considered as one of the most pioneering artists alive...Her work is bound to feminist matters in Eastern Europe and reflects the personal, social and existential difficulties that female artists must face. Recurrent dual structures and the use of sexually ambiguous figures (androgynes and angels) as well as gender-neutralising elements inhabit her work, which occasionally acquires Shamanic overtones and integrates therapeutic mechanisms of liberation." – SoundOhm
