2026
Before What Comes After, 2026
Performance by Vlatka Horvat for HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin in the frame of the festival Love Is a Verb #2: We, the Heartbroken
With Bani Abidi, Candice Breitz, Hana Yoo, İz Öztat, Marina Naprushkina, Season Butler and Vlatka Horvat
Photo: Dorothea Tuch
Courtesy HAU Hebbel am Ufer
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In Before What Came After, artist and performance maker Vlatka Horvat convenes a cast of international artists for an improvised durational performance focused on exchange of photographs from the participants’ personal and family archives. Based in Berlin, but born in different countries, many of which have experienced some form of collapse, turmoil, war, or instability, Horvat’s guests in Before What Came After join her to reflect on the ways in which people endure, negotiate, and transcend processes of societal change.
Beginning from their images presenting objects, scenes, and locations from daily life, the artist-participants draw on their diverse-yet-connected narratives of immigration and diasporic experience, to think together about the entangled nature of the past, the present, and the future; of what was, what is no more, and what might be – and to try to grapple with the current troubling present.
Before What Came After approaches artists’ image archives and stories contained in them as indexes of societal change, using personal narrative, observation, and speculation to think beyond loss, destruction, and erasure towards modes and possibilities for everyday resistance and survival.
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Before What Comes After is a commission by HAU Hebbl am Ufer and is presented in the context of the 2nd edition of HAU’s festival Love Is a Verb, titled We, the Heartbroken, after the essay by Gargi Bhattacharyya.
