Thursday 13 February 2020, 7.30pm
Tinted Window celebrates issue No. 2: Verbivocovisual with an evening of performance and readings dedicated to 'Materializzazione del Linguaggio', a 1978 Venice Biennale exhibition curated by Mirella Bentivoglio which comprised of work by over eighty women artists working in a huge range of media, but united in their interrogation of text, voice and language.
This event features live performances by Cara Tolmie and seminal Hungarian artist and sound poet Katalin Ladik, who took part in the 1978 Venice Biennale exhibition and is interviewed in the issue. Her performance in London is kindly supported by the Hungarian Cultural Centre.
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
Tinted Window continues its focus on a single subject with issue No.2: Verbivocovisual. This issue is dedicated to 'Materializzazione del Linguaggio', a 1978 Venice Biennale exhibition curated by Mirella Bentivoglio. The exhibition comprised of work by over eighty women artists working in a huge range of media, but united in their interrogation of text, voice and language.
In issue No.2, Tinted Window bring much of this work back to the fore where many artists have slipped into the footnotes of an exciting period in art history. But much beyond their focus on this iconic exhibition, the issue features new essays and art projects by some of the best artists working with text, voice and poetry today.
No.2 features new commissions, translations and reprints from: Holly Antrum, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Mirella Bentivoglio, Angela Bianchini, Daniela Cascella, Anne Carson, Paula Claire, Paul Clinton, William Cobbing, Constance DeJong, Karen Di Franco, Sholto Dobie, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Katalin Ladik, Daisy Lafarge, Rosanna Mclaughlin, Silvia Mejía, Hannah Regel, Giovanna Sandri and Sue Tompkins.
Cara Tolmie (born Glasgow, 1984, based in Stockholm) spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely and internationally at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space – both as solo presentations and collaborative projects.
Her practice at large centres itself upon the singing voice, the body, and the complex ties between the two. All at once subjective as well as socially determined, she explores voice and body as two co-dependent entities able to confirm as well as contradict one another. Within this she often explores performative techniques that disorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of the defamiliarised, uncanny and sampled singing voice.
Cara is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.
