Body score /
Testanyag partitúra
// Intertwined
- 2025
Body score / installation, related to Katalin Ladik's video performance and photo documentation entitled "Poemaszk"
“Intertwined” is an exhibition created within the framework of cooperation between the Young Patrons’ Association of the Supporters’ Circle and the Hungarian National Gallery. In the first year of the collaboration, the curators asked five artists under the age of 35 to select one or more objects from the museum's Contemporary Collection that they found interesting and worthy of reflection, and to create a new work based on them. The five artists—Szilvia Bolla, Gideon Horváth, Mónika Kárándi, Adrian Kiss, and Eszter Metzing—approached the museum collection from different angles. The interventions included in the permanent exhibition related to the museumized works in different ways in terms of the artists and periods represented in the collection, as well as in terms of media and materials used.
The newly created works are contemporary, and while the collection they reflect on is called the Contemporary Collection, several decades separate these works of art from each other. This raises the question: where is the boundary between the contemporary and the past? Many people find it difficult to relate to the works of the second half of the 20th century. However, our own experiences and associations can bridge the distance caused by time. Placed alongside the works collected over the past eighty years, the works created during the collaboration offer a visual and theoretical bridge between the past and the present.
Curated by Linda Tarr, Sára Major
It was on display between June 21 and September 30,
at The Hungarian National Gallery, permanent exhibition 2025.
My work entitled “Body Score” attempts to respond to Katalin Ladik’s video and photo documentation entitled “Poemask”. The two works are organically linked, both examining the body, artistic and female identity, aging, and the inevitability of the passage of time, rejecting the illusion of eternity by breaking the possibility of permanence in their material. Ever since I first heard her perform live in 2019, Katalin Ladik’s art has been very important to me. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to meet her in person and talk to her at the beginning of the planning of my concept. I am very grateful that after I wrote to her about my plan, she invited me to her home, where we had a long, deep conversation, which was an amazing experience. According to Ladik, poetry is the most important thing for her, and she considers her art to be an expanded form of poetry, regardless of genre. My work stems from the concept of visual score and reflects Ladik’s approach, in which the artist herself is the artwork.
In my body score, glass embedded in textile flows together with hidden interpretations that can be read from visual stimuli, like a code system, weaving together fleeting fragments of the body’s appearance.
A short text by Linda Tarr, one of the curators of the Intertwined exhibition /
"Eszter Metzing reinterprets the monotonous, meditative act of embroidery to create spatial works grounded in the use of heterogeneous materials. Her tentacled creatures appear both organic and alien; the amorphous, borosilicate glass droplets attached to them evoke solidified “fluids”, thereby reinforcing a dual formal association – recalling tree root systems and human vascular networks. Her soft sculptures revisit the relationship between humanity and nature, and gesture toward a shared, primeval unconscious. Body Score is Metzing’s response to Katalin Ladik’s Poemask series.
In Poemask, a photographic series from 1978, Ladik sprayed dry shampoo onto her face, creating a rigid, mask-like layer. As she moved her face, the coating began to crack and flake away. In this performative act, the artist transformed herself into an artwork, only to then deliberately break the illusion – rejecting the permanence of eternity. Within this context, Ladik explored artistic and feminine identity, aging, and the inevitability of passing time.
Metzing’s soft sculpture engages with these same themes, examining layers of identity and the symbolism of the mask, while also reflecting on the tension between permanence and transformation. The sculpture’s outer “skin”, made of latex tentacles, partially conceals a central core, onto which distorted versions of the artist’s own body-image drawings have been transferred. This outer membrane acts as a protective veil, obscuring the inner “core” – the real or imagined self-image. By altering these images, based on photographs, Metzing also gestures toward the plasticity of selfhood. The amorphous glass droplets reflect the interplay of change and stasis: borosilicate, once malleable, hardens into a seemingly permanent shape – but the same process also leaves it fragile.
The surrounding tentacles can also be read as allegories of ageing and decay, with Time appearing as a creeping, vine-like entity that slowly envelops and dissolves the Self. At the same time, these organic forms invite the interpretation of passing as a natural process and something we must learn to accept."
The photo documentation of the "Poemask" video performance by Katalin Ladik from 1978.
