Anticipating their collaborative performance on 11 April, poet, actress, visual artist, and performer Katalin Ladik – a vanguard of the feminist avant-garde movements in the former Yugoslavia – and composer and experimental sound artist Svetlana Maraš will enter into a conversation with artist and radio maker Ash Kilmartin. The artists will discuss the role of radio and recording, poetry and vocal experimentation, and performance and gender in their work, and the importance of intergenerational exchange and collaboration. 

Katalin Ladik's journey into performance began at the end of the 1960s, where her work in poetry led her to work on Hungarian radio plays, which she did until the end of the 1970s. Searching for her own way of self-expression, she began experimental artistic practices and auto-referential performative explorations of the “gendered self” in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and abroad. A compilation of her work across the 70s titled Phonopoetics (2019) showcases her unbridled flair for vocal experimentation and creative phonetic fabulations. 

Svetlana Maraš is a composer, sound artist, and professor of creative music technology and co-head of the Electronic Studio at Hochschule für Musik FHNW, Basel. Maraš prioritises time-specific and contextual performance over the recording format, which she approaches critically and uses only selectively. She is also former head of Radio Belgrade’s Electronic Studio, where she started collaborating with Katalin Ladik during her residency in 2019. 

Ash Kilmartin is an artist and radiomaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in the Netherlands. She is interested in the uses and meanings of the speaking voice and in finding ways to document the small moments of private and collective experience that shape the way we think our own lives. She is programme lead of Radio WORM, an online community radio platform within WORM Rotterdam.