Ten years after the release of her first solo album, *ALL MACHINE*, Kinga Tóth presents her second album of vocal poetry, titled *MARIAMACHINA*. Kinga Tóth is an artist and sound poet who combines her texts with objects as well as video and sound installations. With her versatile vocal technique, she creates a chorus of bodily sounds, multilingual texts, machine noises, and elements from folk songs.
In MARIAMACHINA, the posthuman cyborgs from ALL MACHINE are brought to life. They are accompanied by chants, songs, chorales, and murmurs, as well as new texts and phrases drawn from recitatives, rhymes, and prayers—inspired by the art of nuns, which Tóth explores as part of her dissertation project. In parallel with her research, the artist experiments with rituals and exercises involving the body, language, and soul, as well as with the concept of silentium, to explore the question of whether “the word” can indeed be brought to life. She internalizes and transcends the boundaries of texts, creating new prayers from the sounds of household objects, natural elements, and her own body.
MARIAMACHINA was released by Hinge Thunder and mixed and mastered by Wouter Rentema. The album’s lyrics will be published by Matthes & Seitz in 2025.
Duration: 20–30 minutes
In cooperation with the Collegium Hungaricum Vienna and the BMEIA
Biography
Kinga Toth (b. 1983, Hungary) is a linguist, visual-sound poet, illustrator, and cultural manager. Toth writes in German, Hungarian, and English and presents her texts in installations and performances. She is also the founder of an organization dedicated to gender equality and women’s representation in the literary scene in Hungary. She researches nuns’ art as part of the WUK-in-PLUS-Mozarteum program and explores the lives and work of nuns in her own artistic practice. In 2020, she received the Hugo Ball Award and the Bernard Heidsieck Prize for her intermedia and international work.
In 2021, she was a guest artist at Villa Waldberta, and her text-and-photo installations were exhibited in Tallinn, her graphic poems at the Centre Pompidou, and her intermedia installation work at the MODEM Gallery. In 2023, she performed her new intermedia theater piece “Electric Jungle” with composer and musician Silvia Rosani as part of the Hannsmann Prize at Theater Rampe in Stuttgart.
In 2023/2024, Kinga Toth received the DAAD Fellowship for Literature in Berlin and is on the shortlist for the Wortmeldungen Literature Prize, as well as for the Lajos Kassak Prize.
In 2024, as part of her DAAD fellowship, she released her vocal-lyric album alongside an object poetry installation at the DAAD Gallery, and she served as Writer-in-Residence at the MuseumsQuartier Wien.
Her new book will be published by Matthes & Seitz in 2025.
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