The exhibition Three Laces Playing initiates a dialogue between two works of Katalin Ladik; the eponymous textile composition with its accompanying sound piece (2008) and the series of photos documenting her Performance in Baltimore (1980). In both of them, textile and more precisely lace, play a pivotal role, and although they differ in medium, both works explore the hiding and revealing potentials of a garment in close connection to the female body. In the title giving collage, she symbolically exposes the hidden contents of lace by interpreting its patterns as a musical score.
In the anti-striptease entitled Performance, Baltimore, another version of her iconic Blackshave Poem, the artist plays a witty trick to the public as under the laced undergarments she wears on top of black clothes that cover her entire body, there is “nothing to see”. Textile is at the core of Ladik’s practice; she has been using it as an autonomous material in her textile collages, as a symbol of women’s silent work and social expectations strictly framing their life, as a reference through her sewing pattern collages, but also as a prop in her performances, always in a playful and softly critical, feminist way.