Screaming Hole

- Screaming Hole
- a sikolto zu lyuk
1979
2 b&w photographs
12,9 × 17,9 cm

In 1979, Katalin Ladik radicalized the constellation of her earlier motifs from the so-called “Blackshave Poem” (1978) performance by amplifying the aspect of voyeurism in her “Screaming Hole” event. The setting of this performance at the Youth Tribune (Tribina Mladih) in Novi Sad was a wooden structure covered with posters; within this environment, the artist surrounded herself with various objects typically associated with “feminine” activities. This is where she presented the anti-striptease and self-shaving familiar from "Blackshave Poem," which viewers could follow by peeping through holes in the torn paper. This performance, which arguably concluded a period in Ladik’s performative practice, is genealogically related to traumas that the artist suffered in connection with political changes in Yugoslavia. 1977 had witnessed a political turning point, a “re-hardening”, and political purges in Yugoslavia with which the regime retroactively punished earlier subversive activities. The reprisals suffered by Ladik were related to the banning of the magazine “Új Symposion” following the removal of its editor in 1971, which had been triggered by the publication of a piece criticizing Tito’s cult of personality. This text, written by the Serbian poet and performance artist Miroslav Mandić, had been translated into Hungarian by Katalin Ladik; as a consequence, 1977 saw her charged in Yugoslavia with subversive activities and indecency. “It was these trivial personal matters, the group of fifteen-to-twenty people around me, that provoked these screams in me”, Ladik commented later on. Screaming Hole articulated the psychological duality of isolation and self-revelation as the reaction of a female subject disempowered by the given historical situation while also reflecting on the politicization of private life. E.Kü.