White Descent

Katalin Ladik – performance artist, actor, and creator of visual works—will conduct a performance piece in the MSN Warsaw staircase.

Katalin Ladik has made a name in the history of experimental music in Central Europe through her radical vocal performances: singing concrete poems, generating visceral sounds evoking machines or animals. The artist employs graphic scores using newspaper clippings, tailor’s patterns and maps. Katalin Ladik’s piece for the MSN Warsaw opening refers to the rhythmic sections of the stairway in the new building. She alludes to Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, an oil painting executed by Marcel Duchamp in 1912, which went on to cause sensation and scandal at the Armory Show in New York the next year.

Presentation of the series as part of the opening program for the new MSN Warsaw building is made possible by cooperation with the Vienna-based Kontakt Collection, a foundation focusing on art in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, particularly from the 1960s and 70s. The Kontakt Collection, founded by the Erste Foundation in cooperation with Erste Group, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The foundation combines collecting with research and instigation of exhibitions, often held in non-museum spaces such as office buildings or shopping malls. The foundation is currently headed by artistic director Kathrin Rhomberg, and links reflections on art from several decades ago with current political, social and environmental issues. The name Kontakt was borrowed from the title of a work by the Slovak artist Július Koller, who wanted art to be involved in “engagement instead of arrangement.” 

Curator: Pierre Bal-Blanc